God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth′s Forbidden Priests and the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot
God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests and the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot
Alice Hogge
A thrilling account of treachery, loyalty and martyrdom in Elizabethan England from an exceptional new writer.As darkness fell on the evening of Friday, 28 October 1588, just weeks after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, two young Englishmen landed in secret on a Norfolk beach. They were Jesuit priests. Their aim was to achieve by force of argument what the Armada had failed to do by force of arms: return England to the Catholic Church.Eighteen years later their mission had been shattered by the actions of a small group of terrorists, the Gunpowder Plotters; they themselves had been accused of designing ‘that most horrid and hellish conspiracy’; and the future of every Catholic they had come to save depended on the silence of an Oxford joiner, builder of priest-holes, being tortured in the Tower of London.‘God’s Secret Agents’ tells the story of Elizabeth’s ‘other’ England, a country at war with an unseen enemy, a country peopled – according to popular pamphlets and Government proclamations – with potential traitors, fifth-columnists and assassins. And it tells this story from the perspective of that unseen ‘enemy’, England’s Catholics, a beleaguered, alienated minority, struggling to uphold its faith.Ultimately, ‘God’s Secret Agents’ is the story of men who would die for their cause undone by men who would kill for it.
GOD’S SECRET AGENTS
Queen Elizabeth’s Forbidden Priests and the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot
ALICE HOGGE
To Nicholas Fordham
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#u0e3a3c5b-dcc2-5d36-8d09-6a26f454cae0)
Title Page (#ufb325db8-6a1f-56ed-a514-87aad3148a83)
Dedication (#uf2a5688b-a7cb-5dbf-85af-4fba6f7fe3de)
One (#u1d1620ef-d0ac-5de0-9d9e-a6bdd8f03494)
Two (#u7dcd5ade-e7bc-594d-8dfb-00b3175e75fa)
Three (#u58df4db6-739a-54e8-83c1-0bc5c607357f)
Four (#ueb5e1b9f-f7da-5bf9-b082-3ddd52964dc9)
Five (#uedc82625-6246-530c-bb0a-695b57d94d6c)
Six (#uf1d99234-4a68-5798-8dd6-a6f6eb6c157a)
Seven (#u134b07bd-07ea-540b-a82e-e59a626ffb35)
Eight (#u232c2ee7-5f08-5b71-8e93-e30760cbbe2b)
Nine (#u837fd214-51e6-5c5f-ae7c-fb67ccf841f8)
Ten (#uf751180e-20a6-5e0a-a567-24cb895d62cb)
Eleven (#u5845e4ba-2a59-58a8-8585-d353409577ed)
Twelve (#uc59aab07-077e-5557-a3d4-d9b32ba53c4c)
Epilogue (#u4289f1d1-ac32-53a5-b44a-31d50fa456fd)
Author’s Note (#u214f1adf-ecd5-509c-9d63-1a45747e4610)
Appendix (#u24a0cf86-31a1-5d0a-9185-03be1b5a20a6)
Endnotes (#uddc78c88-db2c-55c9-9bbe-3afad4a6cc32)
Bibliography (#uc65eaed6-4f59-5a39-8132-80debc66a3bb)
Index (#u7d2d15a8-9463-5f1c-95e7-77c231c4732e)
Acknowledgements (#u40a45da5-c3b5-5f6f-a765-fb20f44c1c28)
About the Author (#u33449ea7-5e5c-5012-bfe0-164ac4251f24)
Copyright (#u74e1b124-1901-5402-99de-edbf258b17f7)
About the Publisher (#u60dae651-1148-5290-b3b6-652d7fb84a3f)
One (#ulink_f075f37c-00ee-5366-aca0-4ee4a839eb4b)
‘…as the waves of the sea, without stay, do one rise and overtake another,
so the Pope and his…ministers be never at rest, but as fast as one
enterprise faileth they take another in hand…hoping at last to prevail.’
Sir Walter Mildmay MP, October 1586
ARMADA YEAR, 1588, swept in on a flood tide of historical prophecies and dire predictions. For the numerologists, who divided the Christian calendar into vast, looping cycles of time, constructed in multiples of seven and ten and based on the Revelation of St John and the bloodier parts of the Book of Isaiah, the year offered nothing less than the opening of the Seventh Seal, the overthrow of Antichrist and the sounding of the trumpets for the Last Judgement.
For the fifteenth century mathematician Regiomontanus, although he had not been quite so specific about the year’s unfolding, still the promise of a solar eclipse in February, and not one but two lunar eclipses in March and August had not, he had thought, augured well.* (#ulink_9e30017e-f800-55b8-87c4-0ef0a76cdef0) Regiomontanus had recorded his findings in Latin verse, concluding: ‘If, this year, total catastrophe does not befall, if land and sea do not collapse in total ruin, yet will the whole world suffer in upheavals, empires will dwindle and from everywhere will be great lamentation.’ As the year began, in Prague the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, himself a keen astrologer, scanned the heavens for signs that his was not the empire to which Regiomontanus referred. He could discover little more than that the weather that year would be unseasonably bad.
The printers of Amsterdam rang in the year with a special edition of their annual almanac, detailing in lurid prose the coming disasters: tempests and floods, midsummer snowstorms, darkness at midday, rain clouds of blood, monstrous births, and strange convulsions of the earth. On a more positive note, they suggested that things would calm down a bit after August and that late autumn might even be lucky for some, but this was not a January horoscope many read with pleasure.
In Spain and Portugal the sailors assembling along the western seaboard talked of little else, no matter that their King, His Most Catholic Majesty Philip II of Spain, regarded all attempts to divine the future as impious. In Lisbon a fortune-teller was arrested for ‘making false and discouraging predictions’, but the arrest came too late: the year had already begun with a flurry of naval desertions. In the Basque ports Philip’s recruiting drive slowed and halted ‘because of many strange and frightening portents that are rumoured’.
In Rome it was brought to the attention of Pope Sixtus V that a recent earth tremor in England had just disgorged an ancient marble slab, concealed for centuries beneath the crypt of Glastonbury Abbey, on which were written in letters of fire the opening words of Regiomontanus’ prediction. It was felt by the papal agent who delivered this report that the mathematician could not, therefore, be the original author of the verses and that the prophecy could stem from one source only: from the magician Merlin. It was the first hint that God might be on the side of the English.
But in England no one mentioned Merlin’s intervention in international affairs and the English almanacs that year were strangely muted affairs, proffering the general observation that ‘Here and in the quarters following might be noted…many strange events to happen which purposely are omitted in good consideration.’ With their fellow printers in Amsterdam working round the clock to meet the public’s demand for gruesome predictions, it seems odd the English press were grown so coy, particularly when the editor of Holinshed’s Chronicles had written the year before that Regiomontanus’ prophecy was ‘rife in every man’s mouth’. But it was not in the Government’s interest that England should be flooded with stories of death and destruction, for it was all too likely that any day now it would be visited by the real thing.* (#ulink_cb6f67f3-4f8a-5a2f-91f2-aed1ceb2f221)
For some four years now England and Spain had been at war: an undeclared phoney war, fought at third hand, on the battlefields of the Low Countries and up and down the Spanish Main, by mercenaries and privateers, most notably the ‘merry, careful’ Francis Drake. Drake’s raid on the port of Cadiz in April 1587 had cost Spain some thirty ships and had bought England a twelvemonth reprieve. But all this did was to postpone the inevitable until the fateful year 1588, because the Spanish were coming, with the mightiest fleet that had ever been amassed. Tall-sided galleons like floating castles, many-oared galleys, cargo-carrying urcas, nimble pataches and zabras, all these had been assembling in the west-coast ports of the Iberian peninsula since 1586. Together they could hold some thirty thousand men, numerous cavalry horses and pack animals and all the many carefully counted barrels of food and water needed to sustain a force of such size. The normally tight-fisted Pope Sixtus—‘When it comes to getting money out of him, it is like squeezing his life blood,’ wrote the Spanish ambassador Olivares to King Philip—had swallowed his respect for the English Queen, Elizabeth I, and signed a treaty with Spain, promising a million gold ducats (about £250,000) to Philip should he manage to conquer England, so long as the next English ruler, a position on which Philip had designs himself, returned the country to Catholicism.* (#ulink_865bf50d-7d84-5ba6-b8f9-1cca8487a817) The Duke of Parma, commander-in-chief of the Spanish Netherlands, was only waiting for the signal to embark his army in a flotilla of flat-bottomed landing-craft, cross the English Channel and sail his forces up the Thames estuary. And all across Europe, rulers and ruled alike stopped what they were doing to watch and wait for the outcome to this clash between the forces of good and evil. This was ideological warfare of a type never before fought in Europe, transcending national boundaries and old-fashioned disputes about landownership. And while the opposing ideologies were, inevitably, somewhat tarnished by political and personal self-interest, nonetheless, in its purest distillation, this war was billed as the deciding round in the conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism, the final answer to a question that had paralysed sixteenth-century Christian Europe, the question of what you could and could not believe. Though few could afford to be combatants, no one could afford to be neutral. But the result, it seemed, was a foregone conclusion.
Ranged against England were the combined forces of Spain, Portugal, the Italian States, and the Spanish Netherlands, with France, though as yet undecided, also likely to join the Catholic crusade. The English troops, in comparison with Spain’s professional, battle-hardened soldiers, were an ill-trained rabble of amateur militiamen, drafted into service at county-wide musters and required to pay for their own gunpowder for the duration of combat. The officers were no better. Most refused to take orders from anyone lower in social standing than themselves. Had it not been for the remodelling of the Queen’s Navy by Drake’s fellow sea-dog, John Hawkins, the outcome of the Armada conflict might well have been very different. Still, Hawkins’s core fleet of twenty-three warships and eighteen smaller pinnaces was heavily outnumbered by the sixty-five galleons that formed the heart of the Spanish Navy. And his belief that the success of Elizabeth’s ships lay in long-range gunnery rather than traditional short-range grappling was not helped by those English gunmakers still busily selling cannons to the Spanish as late as 1587.
So at the beginning of 1588 the odds on the Deity being a Spaniard were temptingly short. ‘Pray to God’, wrote one member of the Armada force, ‘that in England he doth give me a house of some very rich merchant, where I may place my ensign.’ Indeed, for all those about to embark with the Armada, England was a place of lucrative spoils and members of the fleet were delighted by how easy it was to obtain credit on the eve of sailing. Many spent their money on fine clothes for the occasion and one returning Englishman reported that ‘the soldiers and gentlemen that come on this voyage are very richly appointed’. If the hard-headed bankers of Europe were putting their money on an easy victory for Spain, it was small wonder that in December 1587 a false rumour that the Spanish were coming sent the population of England’s coastal towns flying inland for protection.
As May 1588 gave way to a blustery June, a cargo ship under Captain Hans Limburger made its way slowly north from Cadiz, bound for the Hanseatic port of Hamburg. At Cape Espichel, just south of Lisbon, Limburger saw a sight that stunned him. Although Spain’s preparations were no secret to anyone in Europe, nothing had prepared the German captain for this. For one whole day Limburger’s ship beat slowly past the assembled Spanish fleet, ‘the ocean groaning under the weight of them’. At Plymouth Limburger was able to give the port authorities the confirmation they needed: the Armada was under sail and on its way.
Now, after many months of uncertainty, the orders were finally given for all army officers to remain on call and for all troops to be ready to move at an hour’s notice. The better-trained soldiers were positioned near the most likely landing sites, to attack the invasion force while it was disembarking and at its most vulnerable. Barriers of logs and chains were brought in to seal off main roads and all routes into towns and cities. Militia groups were instructed in the scorched-earth policy they were to employ should the Spanish once get a foothold on land. Strategic points such as bridges and fording places were put under guard and instructions were given that in the coastal towns and villages no one was allowed to leave once the warning beacons had been lit, under pain of death. Then the nation waited.
For now the bad weather Emperor Rudolf had seen written in the night skies and that had blown and sobbed its way through Europe for the better part of the year began to play its part in the conflict, breathing new life into the spectres of Regiomontanus’ prophecy. By the end of June the Spanish fleet was still holed up in the port of Corunna as storms swept the Iberian coastline. A month later it was the English Navy’s turn to suffer the high winds and heavy seas as it carried out its daily patrol of the western reaches of the English Channel. ‘I know not what weather you have had there,’ wrote Admiral Lord Howard of Effingham, commander of the fleet, to Sir Francis Walsingham, Principal Secretary of State, at court, ‘but there never was any such summer seen here on the sea.’ With the waiting came the whispering. ‘There has been a rumour at Court, which has spread all over London,’ reported Philip II’s eyes and ears in the English capital, ‘that the Spaniards have orders from their King to slaughter all English people, men and women, over the age of seven years.’
Finally on Friday, 29 July the Armada was sighted off the Cornish coastline, and for Howard, Hawkins, and Drake, and the men of the English Navy, battle commenced. Throughout the following week, between contrary winds and dead calms, the smaller, more mobile English vessels harried their larger, cumbersome Spanish counterparts the length of the Channel, trying at every turn to disrupt the tightly packed crescent formation adopted by the Armada fleet. Shrouded in a heavy pall of gunsmoke it was hard enough for those in the thick of each encounter to know what was going on about them, but for those onshore and far inland the desperate clawing into wind to gain the advantage, the agonizing and hypnotic slowness of the combatants closing on each other, the silence broken by the roar of gunfire, was all a distant, disconnected dream. In mainland Europe rumour had the Armada safely landed in a defeated, humbled England, with a captive Queen Elizabeth on her way to Rome, to appear, barefoot and penitent, before Pope Sixtus. In England they kept on waiting.
On Saturday, 6 August at 5 p.m. the Spanish fleet dropped anchor off Calais to make contact with the Duke of Parma. About midnight on the following day the tide turned, bringing with it, blazing out of the darkness, English fireships, packed with explosives, and in panic the Spaniards cut their cables and fled. The last chapter in the Armada’s story had begun. ‘From this piece of industry,’ wrote one Spanish officer, ‘they dislodged us with eight vessels, an exploit which with [our] one hundred and thirty they had not been able to do nor dared to attempt.’ What the fireships started, the storm-force winds now continued, sweeping the scattered Spanish fleet first towards the shoals of the Zeeland banks and then helplessly northwards up the English coast. For another Spanish officer this had become ‘the most fearful day in the world’. The Duke of Medina Sidonia, the Armada’s ill-fated and much maligned commander, now placed himself squarely in the hands of ‘God and His Blessed Mother to bring him to a port of safety’.* (#ulink_4b10436b-a463-5827-be2c-fabb8c5f0724)
The report of the Armada’s inadvertent flight north reached Queen Elizabeth as she was addressing her troops at Tilbury camp on 18 August, more than a week after the event. But even this good news did not come rumour-free, for now the Duke of Parma and his army were said to be on their way across the Channel. It was not until the end of August that the Dean of St Paul’s was ordered to announce officially that the Armada had been defeated and Philip II’s agent in London was able to write home to Spain on 7 September that ‘the Lords of the Council went to St Paul’s to give thanks to God for having rescued the realm from its recent danger’. Just three days later, though, another alarm was spread that the Armada was on its way back. By the beginning of November, after ten weeks of continued uncertainty, the public’s nerves were frayed to unravelling point. Parliament, which was to have met on 12 November, was prorogued until February ‘as it was seen that both people and nobles were weary of so much trouble’, wrote Marco Antonio Micea, a Genoese resident in London. ‘We are in such alarm and terror here that there is no sign of rejoicing amongst the Councillors at the victories they have gained. They look rather like men who have a heavy burden to bear.’ Even Elizabeth, who was not normally chary when it came to her own personal safety, was persuaded by her Council to stay away from St Paul’s ‘for fear that a harquebuss might be fired at her’. Micea noted that the fifty-five-year-old Queen looked ‘much aged and spent’. Perhaps the Spanish fleet had made for Scotland and had succeeded in persuading King James VI to avenge his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots’ execution of the year before; or perhaps they had rounded Scotland and were now in Ireland, stirring up trouble among the rebels there. In response to this new fear the Queen ‘sent Sir Thomas Perrot to raise 2,000 men in Wales, and take them over [to Ireland] with all speed’. The extent of Elizabeth’s anxiety may be measured by her willingness to throw yet more money at the conflict.
But if in England no one could quite believe they had won, on the Continent no one could believe that the Spanish had lost. The French ambassador in London had spent his summer merrily reporting stories of heavy English casualties, so when the English ambassador in Paris, Sir Edward Stafford, produced 400 pamphlets giving the English version of events, he was met with frank incredulity. ‘The English ambassador here had some fancy news printed stating that the English had been victorious,’ wrote Don Bernadino Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador in Paris, ‘but the people would not allow it to be sold, as they say it is all lies. One of the ambassador’s secretaries began to read in the palace a [report] which he said had been sent from England, but the people were so enraged that he was obliged to fly for his life.’ Only Pope Sixtus remained unimpressed by the European rumour-mill, refusing to loosen his grip on the million gold ducats he had promised Spain until he had better proof of Spanish success.
On 24 November England at last felt confident enough to celebrate its victory and ‘a solemn procession…was held to give thanks to God for the scattering of the Spanish fleet’. Through winter streets hung with blue cloth, Elizabeth ‘was carried in a gilded chair…drawn by two grey horses royally caparisoned…to the great cathedral of St Paul’s’, from the battlements of which eleven captured Armada banners streamed out above the city. Here, Elizabeth read out a prayer she had composed specially for the occasion. The mood was one of relief, but also, more pertinently, of sober thanksgiving. In the words of the medal struck to celebrate England’s victory: ‘God blew and they were scattered’. The victory was His.
And in giving this victory to God, Elizabeth extended a process begun by her father, Henry VIII, many years before: the process of nationalizing England’s state religion.* (#ulink_908b91d9-2851-5926-80be-acba709123ec) It was an inadvertent process, born out of fear: Henry’s fear of plunging his country back into yet another round of civil war if he failed to produce a male heir. And it was a process concluded in fear: the fear of standing alone and vulnerable against the richest and most powerful nation in Europe. The God who won the Armada could not be a Protestant God, at least not in the way Protestantism was understood throughout the rest of Europe. That God had demonstrably failed to help the Calvinists in the Low Countries; to protect the Huguenots of France from the St Bartholomew massacre of 1572; to save William of Orange from assassination in 1584. Neither could He be a Catholic. Not when the Armada carried at its head a consecrated standard bearing the rallying cry ‘Arise, oh Lord, and avenge thy cause’. Not when each ship had been provided with its own priest and each member of the expedition had received absolution in advance for the blood he would shed.* (#ulink_c320b6c1-667c-5f0b-8717-ac6867e841ef) Therefore, He could only be an Anglican God, that compromise and most English of Gods, who continued to frustrate both Catholics and Protestants in almost equal measure.† (#ulink_5687e161-0834-5a5b-a5ca-624722b2952e) So the subtle propaganda ran. In a Europe ravaged by wars of religion, only the English had chosen correctly.
And how lucky it was that God should be an Anglican, an Englishman, for no one believed for a moment that England’s conflict with Catholic Spain was over. Indeed, at the beginning of November the Venetian ambassador to Spain reported home to the Doge that ‘In spite of everything, His Majesty shows himself determined to carry on the war.’ So though the coach that bore Elizabeth to St Paul’s Cathedral ‘was open in front and on both sides’ so that she might better be seen by crowds of cheering Londoners, yet her Government was taking no risks. An order had been given ‘that in every household along the route no one should be allowed to look out from the windows while she was passing, unless the householder was prepared to stake his life and entire fortune on his trustworthiness.’ This was an England gripped in the jaws of fear and suspicion.
On Friday, 28 October 1588 a sailing ship beat its way slowly up the Norfolk coast. On board, its passengers scanned the shoreline for a suitable landing place. Having spotted what looked like a safe point between Happisburgh and Bacton, some miles to the south of Cromer, they ordered the crew to drop anchor until nightfall. As darkness fell the ship’s boat was launched and headed into shore. When it returned to the ship, it left standing on the beach two young Englishmen of whom the English Government had every reason to feel fearful and suspicious. The pair were Catholic priests belonging to the Society of Jesus, and their intention was to succeed where the Spanish Armada had failed: to return England to the Catholic Church. If the Armada was the latest in a progression of Franco-Spanish ‘Enterprises’ sanctioned by the Pope and designed to restore English Catholicism through force of arms, then these two young men represented Rome’s second line of spiritual attack: force of argument.* (#ulink_af63644f-9a32-5912-872a-0632745a7c32)
Argument had always been the Christian Church’s best weapon against heresy, chiefly because most heretical behaviour was thought to be a consequence of ignorance, poor judgement, or an imperfect understanding of the teachings of Christ.† (#ulink_36d705c0-1902-5b6d-a20b-08ca38961414) Such heretics were not sinful therefore, merely misguided, and required little more than clear reasoning to make them see the error of their ways. Of course there were other heretics who wilfully rejected Christ’s doctrines—out of pride, or a lust for power perhaps. They were sinners and merited the full weight of the Church’s wrath, which, ever since the eleventh century, had usually meant burning at the stake. There was a further subset of heresy still: schism, the rejection of papal supremacy. For the rebellious schismatic (who might uphold all Christ’s other teachings but this one) as for the misguided heretic, argument was deemed the best form of correction. So while Rome supported the invasion of England and the deposition of Elizabeth—her wilful heresy had imperilled the souls of her countrymen and God would forgive the use of force against her—it also dispatched its army of arguers. It was belief in the divine purpose of their argument that filled the two Englishmen now standing in the dark of a Norfolk beach, straining to hear above the noise of the waves on the shingle any sound to suggest their landing had been observed.* (#ulink_6758b6fb-0d7b-5bfb-b243-6d46d860f6eb)
Neither man had been long enough in Rome to forget the seeping chill of late October English rain. The bad weather that had so hampered the Armada had not abated and the year was ending with as cold a spell as it had begun. But the rain and the cold were the least of the two men’s worries as they now tried to put as much distance between them and the coast before dawn. In the dark it was impossible to pick a path that did not lead them up to a house instead of out into open fields. Twice, three times, a dog barked as they neared one of the fishermen’s cottages flanking the beach and hastily they retraced their steps. Finally, they headed into a nearby wood to take cover until first light. There, in whispers, they decided it would be safer to separate and each make his own way to London; that way, if one of them should be caught, the other still had a chance of reaching the capital undetected. As soon as it was light enough to see, the older of the two men, twenty-seven-year-old Edward Oldcorne, son of a Yorkshire bricklayer, made his way northwards out of the wood towards the town of Mundesley. On the road he fell in with a party of sailors, demobbed and returning home after the defeat of the Armada, and in their company and with the cover they unwittingly afforded him, he made his way to London.
Meanwhile, his companion was leaving the wood by a different path. John Gerard was twenty-four. He was born on 4 October 1564, the son of the prominent Lancashire landowner Sir Thomas Gerard, a former county sheriff.* (#ulink_a6eb2867-84fb-5f99-9faa-1c4d1d8bfd88) At the age of five John Gerard was removed from his parents’ care when it was discovered his father was involved in a scheme to rescue the newly imprisoned Mary, Queen of Scots from Tutbury Castle in Staffordshire and restore her to the Scottish throne. Sir Thomas Gerard was arrested and held in the Tower of London until 1573. On his release he collected his eight-year-old son from the family of strangers on whom he had been forcibly billeted and returned with him to Lancashire, to Bryn Hall, the Gerards’ estate. Whatever the effect on John Gerard of being ripped from his home at so young an age, these events did little to persuade him to conform to the State Church. At the age of just twelve he was sent down from Exeter College, Oxford for refusing to attend a Protestant Easter service.
In the summer of 1577 Gerard applied for, and received, a licence to travel abroad to study. For the next three years he attended lectures at Dr William Allen’s English College, first at the University of Douai in the Spanish Netherlands, then, when the college was expelled from there, at the University of Reims. Allen, an exiled Oxford academic, had opened the English College as a training school for those English boys still wishing to enter the Catholic priesthood, now that this was forbidden to them in their own country. The college also offered a thorough education to any English student unwilling to swear allegiance to the new Church of England, an oath required of all those graduating from the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. At Reims Gerard first came into contact with a member of the Society of Jesus, an English Jesuit named Lovel, and from Reims he travelled to Cleremont, the school of the French Jesuits near Paris, determined to join the Society himself. He was not yet sixteen.
The Society of Jesus was a new religious order, founded in 1540 by a Spanish ex-soldier called Ignatius Loyola, with the specific aim of converting the heathen and reconciling the lapsed. Loyola dreamed of countering the rise of Protestantism and restoring the Catholic Church to its former pre-eminence in Europe. To this end he had brought all his army training to bear on the problem in hand: ‘I have never left the army,’ he explained, ‘I have only been seconded to the service of God.’ His Jesuits operated as a tightly knit organization bound by a rigid, even military discipline, and Gerard, who used his time at the college to continue his studies, was quickly impressed by the elite band of priests who taught him. When illness forced him to return to England in the spring of 1583, he spent his convalescence disposing of his property and possessions in preparation for a new life among them.
His difficulty came in leaving the country for a second time. To leave England without State permission was a crime according to English law. To leave England to train as a Catholic priest was still worse a crime, the effects of which were often felt by the criminal’s family in his absence. Gerard chose to leave the country without a licence. With a party of other Catholics, all heading abroad with intentions similar to his own, he set sail from Gravesend early in November 1583. The weather was against them. After five days at sea, making heavy progress into strong winds, they were forced to put in to Dover. At Dover it was revealed they had a spy in their company when the entire party was arrested by customs officers and sent up to London for questioning. The spy, Thomas Dodwell, reported back to the Privy Council how the group had bribed ‘Raindall, the [officer] of Gravesend, [who] receiveth money of passengers, suffering them to pass without searching.’
While his companions were imprisoned, the nineteen-year-old Gerard (whose cousin Sir Gilbert Gerard was Master of the Rolls and held some sway with the Government) was taken into custody first by his uncle, George Hastings, brother to the Earl of Huntingdon, then by the Bishop of London. Both men set about encouraging Gerard to convert to the Protestant faith. Both men failed. It was a measure of his strength of will that the teenager held out against the arguments of his two more powerful opponents, with the threat of imprisonment, and worse, hanging over his head. But whatever fear Gerard might have felt, he left the Bishop of London’s palace for prison still protesting his Catholicism.
John Gerard was committed to the Marshalsea prison in Southwark on 5 March 1584. His year-long imprisonment was spent in the heady company of like-minded rebels against the nationalized Church: laymen and women arrested for their refusal to attend Protestant services and a number of priests awaiting execution. It was an intoxicating education. When at last his friends were able to secure his release from prison, in return for paid guarantees that he would not leave the country, his desire to become a Jesuit burnt fiercer than ever. At the end of May 1586 his chance came. An old friend of his, Anthony Babington, agreed to stand bail for him if he failed to appear before the authorities at the next quarter and John Gerard escaped to France. He was twenty-one.
From France, Gerard travelled south to Italy, where he entered the English College of Rome, the companion school to Dr William Allen’s successful Reims institution. By now his general eagerness to become a priest had transformed itself into the specific ambition of becoming a priest on the English mission. Pope Sixtus V granted him dispensation to take his holy orders early, some months short of the statutory age. The Society of Jesus agreed to admit him into their ranks as a novice and let him finish his training as he worked. And at last, on 15 August 1588, John Gerard became a Jesuit priest in the company of Edward Oldcorne. He was ready to return home.
Throughout late August and all of September, as the Armada fleet underwent its grim circumnavigation of the British Isles and rumour ran unchecked through the courts of Europe, Gerard and Oldcorne travelled north towards England, accompanied by two other priests. ‘Passing through Switzerland,’ Gerard wrote, ‘we stayed a night at Basle and decided to see the old Catholic buildings of the town: the Lutherans usually leave them intact but the Calvinists destroy them.’ At Reims, he noted, ‘we passed incognito’: the seminary city was full of spies. In Paris a prisoner in one of the city gaols calling himself Jacques Colerdin learned of their arrival. On 1 October Colerdin was able to scribble a letter to Sir Francis Walsingham in London, telling him that ‘There be 8 Priests over from Rome, whereof John Gerard…will be in England within five days.’ Colerdin, who described himself to the Archbishop of Paris as ‘an English priest and Bachelor in Theology’ in a petition he wrote seeking his release, was a Government informer.* (#ulink_1b738b6c-ef35-5ed7-8c22-b1bd74afa768) His real name was Gilbert Gifford. He was, indeed, a Catholic priest, but since his arrest as an alleged accomplice in the Babington Plot he had found it prudent to switch sides in the religious conflict.† (#ulink_bf616b46-ee7a-5cda-8e66-cae36d68ff56) Now he was well placed to point out his fellow seminarians to the English authorities.
From Paris, Gerard and Oldcorne continued on to Eu, some miles north of Dieppe, in preparation for crossing the Channel. But here they received unwelcome news from England. ‘The Spanish Fleet’, wrote Gerard, ‘had exasperated the people against the Catholics; everywhere a hunt was being organised for Catholics and their houses searched; in every village and along all the roads and lanes very close watches were kept to catch them.’ Clearly conditions at home were far from ideal for them to attempt a landing in secret and for the next few weeks the pair were forced to kick their heels on the French coast, while their superiors back in Rome decided what should be done. At last a letter came through: ‘we were free’, wrote Gerard, ‘either to go ahead with the enterprise or stay back until things in England had quietened down. This was the answer we desired.’ Immediately, the two men set about finding a ship.
As John Gerard stood in the shadows of a Norfolk wood choosing the best and safest route to London, he had already committed treason, according to England’s latest laws. The act of 1585 ‘against Jesuits, seminary priests and such other like disobedient persons’, one of nine pieces of parliamentary legislation during Elizabeth’s reign to seek to redefine treachery in the face of a newly perceived menace, employed bully-boy language to make its point. Any Englishman ordained a Catholic priest since June 1559 would, the act threatened, soon find out ‘how dangerous it shall be for them…once to put their foot on land within any of her Majesty’s dominions’. In returning home, in stepping from his ship’s boat onto a Norfolk beach, John Gerard had become a traitor to his country. If caught, he would be punished accordingly. As he left the wood, heading westwards, he was spotted by a group of men walking towards him.* (#ulink_a292c057-a0e5-5a0f-9755-4c8d78d6bae5)
Gerard takes up the story:
‘Walking boldly up to them I asked whether they knew anything about a stray hawk; perhaps they had heard its bell tinkling as it was flying around. I wanted them to believe that I had lost my bird and was wandering about the countryside in search of it [then] they would not be surprised because I was a stranger here and unfamiliar with the lanes and countryside; they would merely think that I had wandered here in my search…They told me they had not seen or heard a falcon recently and they seemed sorry that they could not put me on its track. So with a disappointed look I went off as if I were going to search for it in the trees and hedges round about.’
This was his strategy for the rest of that day. Each time he saw someone working in the fields he approached them, asking them the same question: had they seen his hawk? His progress was slow. Occasionally he doubled back on his tracks to make his search more convincing. But gradually he moved inland, away from the sea.
‘At the end of the day I was soaked with rain and felt hungry. It had been a rough crossing and I had been able to take practically no food or sleep on board, so I turned for the night into an inn in a village I was passing, thinking that they were less likely to question a man they saw entering an inn.’ Inside, he made enquiries about buying a pony and found the people willing to help him. The following morning, Sunday, 30 October, he set off on horseback towards Norwich, no longer in any danger of being taken for a vagrant, but still at the mercy of the county watches. At the village of Worstead he was apprehended.
‘They ordered me to dismount, and asked me who I was and where I came from. I told them I was in the service of a certain lord who lived in another county—he did in fact know me well, although these men had not heard of him—and I explained that my falcon had flown away and I had come here to see whether I could recover it.’ But this time the watchers refused to release him, insisting he be brought before the constable and the officer of the watch for further questioning. Gerard submitted and was led to the village church where the two men were attending morning service. Now he was faced with a dilemma. ‘One of the watchers went in [to the church] and came back with the answer that [the officer] wanted me to come inside where he would see me at the end of the service.’ For Gerard it was a sin to enter a Protestant church. So Gerard refused to go in, claiming he was reluctant to leave his horse behind. When the officer at last came out to question him he was clearly angry and suspicious. ‘He asked me first where I came from and I named a number of places which I had learned were not far away. Then he asked me my name, employment, home, the reason for my coming, and I gave him the answers that I had given before. Finally on asking whether I was carrying any letters, I invited him to search me.’ The officer was unimpressed. He declared ‘it was his duty to take me before the Justice of the Peace’, and Gerard prepared himself for immediate arrest. Then suddenly the man relented, with the words, ‘You’ve got the look of an honest fellow. Go on then in God’s name.’ Later, Gerard attributed this stroke of good fortune to providence. Now, he hurriedly set off towards Norwich before the officer could change his mind.
Furnished by a fellow traveller with the name of a suitable inn on the southernmost outskirts of Norwich, Gerard circled the city walls. He avoided the busy London road, which led into the city through the well-guarded St Stephen’s Gates, and passed instead over common grazing land to Brazen Doors, a smaller set of gates that opened onto All Saints Green. From there it was a short walk to the inn on Market Hill, at the foot of Norwich Castle.
The inn was busy and Gerard settled himself down to observe. ‘I was there only a short time when in walked a man who seemed well known to the people of the house. He greeted me courteously and then sat down by the fire to warm himself. He began talking about some Catholic gentlemen imprisoned in the city and mentioned by name a man, one of whose relatives had been with me in the Marshalsea Prison…I listened carefully but said nothing.’ When the man left the room, Gerard asked his neighbour who he was. The reply was welcome news to him: ‘He is a very good fellow, except for the fact that he is a Papist.’ The man was out on bail from the city gaol after a decade in prison for his faith and he was, by common consent, ‘a most pig-headed’ Catholic.* (#ulink_07fc9034-06c5-569b-a565-26b6f0f944ce)
‘I kept quiet until the man returned and when the others had gone out I told him that I wanted to have a word with him in some safe place. I had heard he was a Catholic, I said, and was very pleased to hear it because I was one too.’ Briefly, Gerard explained how he came to be in Norwich and asked for the man’s assistance in getting to London. The man knew of no one travelling to the capital that Gerard could join, and so pass as one of their party, but he did know someone in town who might be able to help him and he left the inn to find this contact.
When he returned to the inn a short while later he asked Gerard to follow him out onto the street and into the thick of the bustling market. While the two men pretended to examine the various goods for sale they were observed from a distance by a third man. Soon he approached the pair and asked them both to come with him. He led the way through the narrow side streets of Norwich towards the city’s cathedral. There, in the cavernous nave of the great church, the man questioned Gerard intently before asking him outright whether he was a priest—in which case, said the man, he would offer him all the help he needed.* (#ulink_230e26b5-01b0-5ff7-814a-bd03208baa10) Gerard asked his name. Then he admitted he was a Jesuit priest sent from Rome.
The printers of Amsterdam, as they compiled their annual almanac for 1588, had predicted that late autumn would be lucky for some. So it had proved for John Gerard. The man in whose hands he had just placed his life was Edward Yelverton, one of the richest Catholics in Norfolk. That same evening Yelverton spirited Gerard out of Norwich and by Monday, 31 October the priest had gone to ground at Yelverton’s house at Grimston, 6
/
miles northeast of King’s Lynn. After forty-eight hours at large Gerard had reached a safe haven. His work, though, had only just begun. And with the events of the summer that work had become harder still.
The Spanish Armada had achieved what no amount of religious reforms and parliamentary legislation over the preceding decades had been able to do. It had united a fractured nation behind its unhappy compromise of a nationalized Church in opposition to the Catholic crusade. It had bound Anglicanism and Englishness together seemingly indissolubly. And it had transformed all those who could not bring themselves to accept this new Church of England into potential traitors, fifth columnists willing, in the rhetoric of a royal proclamation issued that July, ‘to betray their own natural country and most unnaturally to join with foreign enemies in the spoil and destruction of the same’. To be a Catholic in the year 1588 was to be an unnatural Englishman. It was to be worse than that still, as a story told by a fellow Jesuit illustrated. In late August, as many Catholics awaited execution for their alleged treachery, a ‘certain lady went to a man of importance asking him to use his influence that the death of one of the condemned might be delayed. The first question was whether the person whose cause she pleaded was guilty of murder. She replied that he had not been condemned for any such thing, but only for the Catholic religion. “Oh dear,” said the gentleman, “For his religion! If he had committed murder I should not have hesitated to comply with your request; but as it is a question of religion, I dare not interfere.”’ To the English in Armada year, even homicide was less of an evil than Catholicism.
And Gerard had come to join a covert mission, the first undertaking of which was to ask English Catholics to stand up and be counted, to demonstrate their faith by refusing to attend the Protestant Church, to identify themselves to a Government seeking to eradicate them as traitors. Small wonder then that in an England still reeling from the events of that year, in an England crying out for revenge, this task had acquired Herculean proportions.* (#ulink_5936537b-084a-5b9d-914d-57357b49a120)
Fourteen years earlier, though, for the first young English priests to embark upon this newly begun mission, their venture must have seemed no less a trial of strength. They might have been returning home to their family and friends, but at the same time they were entering an unfamiliar, hostile world: a beleaguered and suspicious England whose savagery had yet to be put to the test. And they were entering that world in secret, in disguise, in the very manner of the political secret agents their homeland believed them to be. Formidable, too, had been the challenge of establishing the mission at the start, of drawing together the dejected exiles from an Oxford University shattered by religious reforms, of schooling them in martyrdom and of dispatching them home in increasing numbers to face unknown perils.
For his ninth task Hercules had only to steal the Amazon Queen’s belt—a gift she herself had been willing to grant him. John Gerard and his fellows were attempting to steal the souls of English men and women back to the Catholic Church, and to do so under the nose of the, perhaps, even more redoubtable English Queen. It was a labour that would come at a high price.
* (#ulink_ee421f01-9f92-52ac-bace-1d1b6cf1fd22) Regiomontanus’s real name was Johan Muller, from Königsberg, now Kaliningrad, in Lithuania. He supplied Christopher Columbus with astronomical tables on his voyage across the Atlantic.
* (#ulink_4b8931e4-4190-5b7e-8382-934064b0426d) At the beginning of 1588 Dr John Harvey was commissioned by the Privy Council to write an academic pamphlet denouncing the accuracy of prophecies in general and Regiomontanus’s in particular.
* (#ulink_fa28b6e2-0a34-5332-a9dd-106313d1ddf6) Sixtus had said of Elizabeth ‘were she only a Catholic, she would be without her match, and we would esteem her highly’.
* (#ulink_e8a1029e-b5fe-5124-be38-caf7a65dc30e) His flagship, the San Martin, reached the Spanish port of Santander on 21 September, with 180 of her crew dead from disease and starvation, another forty killed in battle and the rest so weak the ship had to be towed into dock. Only some seventy ships of the fleet returned.
* (#ulink_a8fee17c-5927-5f5f-9e22-0fb3f2bbb3a2) In the context of this book the term ‘nationalism’ is not intended to convey any pre-occupation with English ethnic identity; rather, it is intended to convey the growing sense of English sovereignty at this period, in response to the fragmentation of Christendom and England’s loss of its European territories.
* (#ulink_a8fee17c-5927-5f5f-9e22-0fb3f2bbb3a2) The Duke of Medina Sidonia’s sailing orders to his fleet confirmed that ‘the principal foundation and cause, that have moved the King his Majesty to make and continue this journey, hath been, and is, to serve God; and to return unto his church a great many of contrite souls, that are oppressed by the heretics, enemies to our holy catholic faith’.
† (#ulink_a8fee17c-5927-5f5f-9e22-0fb3f2bbb3a2) The terms Catholic, Protestant and Anglican should be applied with a certain linguistic caution. Broadly, the word ‘Catholic’ was by now recognized to refer only to those followers of the Roman Church. The word ‘Protestant’ referred initially only to German church reformers, though by the late sixteenth century it had acquired a wider reference and was in use in England to describe followers of the State Church. English Protestantism, though, was a very different animal from its European counterparts. The word ‘Anglican’ seems first to have been used as a derogatory term by King James VI of Scotland in 1598. It was not until much later that it became synonymous with the Church of England and English Protestantism.
* (#ulink_1ffc140a-b860-5f53-aa42-145faaee2b20) In 1585 Philip II had offered himself to Pope Sixtus V as the sword of the Catholic Church in the fight to reconcile England with Rome. Previously, French Catholics, led by the powerful Guise family, had planned a series of invasions, with the intention of deposing Elizabeth and replacing her with the half-French Mary, Queen of Scots (Mary’s mother was Mary of Guise). Mary was Elizabeth’s de facto heir apparent, although Elizabeth never acknowledged her as such.
† (#ulink_453f77ff-f6a2-5f42-8448-d36e00c7a414) Heretics, as defined by St Thomas (II-II: 11: 1) were those who, having professed the faith of Christ, then proceeded to corrupt it from within. They differed from Infidels who refused to believe in Christ at all, and from Apostates who renounced Christianity for another faith, or no faith altogether. The word heresy derives from the Greek word for choice.
* (#ulink_453f77ff-f6a2-5f42-8448-d36e00c7a414) Every detail of this landing is taken from an account of it written up afterwards by one of the two Jesuits, Father John Gerard.
* (#ulink_1a0e42e7-3b21-5a53-a488-553fbc927341) The sheriff was the Crown’s chief executive officer in a county, in charge of keeping the peace, dispensing justice, and overseeing local elections.
* (#ulink_15d1f792-08cf-5d28-8415-4354d04d4abd) He was arrested in a Paris brothel in 1587, though the precise nature of his crime remains unclear. He died in prison in 1590.
† (#ulink_15d1f792-08cf-5d28-8415-4354d04d4abd) The 1586 Babington Plot was the last in a series of Catholic attempts to assassinate Elizabeth and free Mary, Queen of Scots in advance of a foreign invasion; it led to Mary’s execution. Anthony Babington, Gerard’s friend, appears to have been a man of more devotion than sense and how much the plot was the work of agents provocateurs remains ambiguous. Gilbert Gifford’s role is particularly questionable and most believe he was working for Walsingham from the start. Gerard’s father was also arrested for alleged complicity in the plot. He was released in October 1588.
* (#ulink_ba32c155-a30c-5c0b-a62a-b98d3694e13d) The coastal counties had borne the brunt of the nation’s anxiety during the Armada conflict. Close watches had been kept throughout the summer months for spies, Spanish ships, and anything suspicious; now those same coastal watches were kept busy patrolling the countryside looking for vagabonds. The vagabonds in question were disbanded sailors and militiamen, laid off without their promised pay and in search of food and work. Since the Armada, an order had been issued that any vagabond ‘found with any manifest offence tending to stir troubles or rebellion…[was]…to be executed by martial law’.
* (#ulink_4f6f6784-5ec9-54c2-ada1-c1e2490246e9) The ‘pig-headed’ Catholic gentleman was almost certainly the Norfolk landowner Robert Downes, whose Melton estate lay just a mile west of Norwich. He was arrested in 1578 for his refusal to attend the Protestant Church. He lost his estates in Suffolk and Essex and in 1602 he surrendered most of his life interest in Melton to the Queen. He was still in Norwich gaol in 1598. He died in 1610.
* (#ulink_f721bc4a-cab1-5e80-beec-eb403aeb1315) Catholics believed that though they could not enter a Protestant church where divine services were held, the nave of a cathedral was part of the general precincts of the building and therefore not sacrosanct.
* (#ulink_748cd99b-a8fa-52d4-89dc-cec0f20feb45) One eyewitness wrote of the vengeance taken against English Catholics following the Armada’s defeat: ‘When the danger of the war at sea was over, and the army conscripted upon land dispersed, our rulers turned their weapons from the foe abroad and plunged them into the bowels of their own nation. The hatred stored up against the Spaniards they are wreaking with a sort of bestial fury upon their own fellow citizens and subjects.’
Two (#ulink_66206c88-db52-5d71-b29e-20586b09b544)
‘If God himself on earth abode would make
He Oxford sure would for his dwelling take.’
(Sixteenth century)
ON 10 DECEMBER 1566, eight years into the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and twenty years prior to John Gerard’s secret Norfolk landing, Magdalen College acquired a new tenant for its property at 3 Castle Street, standing in the shadow of Oxford Castle. The tenant’s name was Walter Owen. He was a twenty-six-year-old carpenter with a wife and young family. In time, all four sons from this family would join the mission to save English Catholicism. Two would die for it. One, in death, would hold in his hands the life of almost every Catholic involved in it. His name was Nicholas Owen.
Few facts are known about Nicholas Owen’s childhood: an approximate date of birth (some time between 1561 and 1564), a joinery apprenticeship (in February 1577) to Oxford’s William Conway, and the location of the Owen family’s house on Castle Street—little more. Across the road from this six-room, two-storey tenement stood the twelfth century parish church of St Peter-le-Bailey, a ‘very old little church and odd’. Four doors to the left of the house was 7 Castle Street, called Billing Hall or the Redcock. Here, in 1298, it was said a clerk had caused the Devil to appear. A few yards to the right of the house were the butchers’ shambles, a row of shops in the middle of the newly paved Great Bailey Street. Here, the blood and offal spilt from the freshly killed carcasses coursed over the gravel and into the drainage channel running down the centre of the road. Heaven, hell and the stench of blood: Nicholas Owen was raised within the axis of all three.
Further still to the left, high up on the hill, stood the tall tensided keep of Oxford Castle, its walls as thick as a man was tall. Within that keep there stood another, its walls only slightly less thick, and inside that there was the well chamber, with a well shaft so deep you could not fathom the bottom of it. Walls within walls, chambers within chambers: Oxford Castle would provide plenty of inspiration for Nicholas Owen in his later life. Beyond the keep there lay the castle gaol and next to the castle gaol there stood the gallows.
The castle was in a ruinous state by the time of Owen’s birth: the seat of Oxford’s civic power had long ago shifted to the city’s Council Chambers. But beyond the parish of St Peter-le-Bailey, to its west, lay evidence of a more recent power-shift still. Here were the remains of Oseney Abbey, lately Oxford’s cathedral. All that was left of it were the church walls, the dovecote and the outbuildings; the rest of the stone had been stripped from the site and carried over to the construction works at Christ Church College. Further to the south a similar process was at work as the Franciscan and Dominican friaries were dismantled piece by piece by city speculators and sold off to make new townhouses.
The landscape of England was being re-drawn. The castles and manor houses of the old feudal aristocracy had shared their domination of the English countryside with the spires and steeples of the abbeys, priories and monasteries. They had stamped their authority on the public consciousness by the sheer scale of their physical presence. But both aristocrats and abbots had found themselves systematically stripped of that authority in Tudor England. And all those who had bowed to the seigniority of Nobility and Church, who had prospered under it or were sheltered by it, were left shivering in the brisk winds of change.
This was the birth of modern England, with a newly re-worked relationship between Parliament and monarch, and an increasing dependence on the unstoppable middle classes. Of course for some it had been an entirely unwanted pregnancy, but for many, many more across the nation, some with, some without a vested interest in the old order, but all of them sharing a strong desire for stability and the certainty of tradition, it would prove a difficult birth: bloody and unutterably painful. And nowhere was this truer than at Oxford.
On 3 February 1530, just over thirty years before Nicholas Owen was born, William Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury, peremptorily thrust Oxford University into the centre of the controversy of the hour. He wrote to the Vice-Chancellor asking him and Oxford’s academics to provide a unanimous opinion on the validity of the marriage of Henry VIII to Catherine of Aragon.
The request was as untactful as it was unwelcome: Cardinal Wolsey, the university’s wealthiest patron, had been arrested only the year before for failing to provide Henry with the verdict he was looking for. And now it must have seemed to those at Oxford, asked to enter after Wolsey into this most explosive of minefields, that the Cardinal’s downfall would soon be followed by their own. So Oxford dragged its heels. When Cambridge, to the same request, came quickly back with the answer Henry wanted, the relief in the fens might have been palpable but the spotlight now shone ever more brightly on the midlands. And still Oxford dragged its heels.
In early April the King could wait no longer. His agents, led by the Bishop of Lincoln, descended on the university, hotly pursued by a strongly worded letter from Henry himself. While the bishop worked on Convocation, persuading them to hand the matter over to the university’s theologians, Henry reminded the ‘youth’ of Oxford precisely where their loyalties lay. This two-pronged attack produced the desired result. Though the Faculty of Arts grumbled that the Faculty of Theology had no right to speak for the university as a whole, the combination of manipulation and not so veiled threat had won the day. On 8 April Oxford University gave Henry the answer he was looking for: his marriage was invalid. But its tardiness in doing so was neither forgiven nor forgotten.* (#ulink_76cb328b-2e74-5ea2-abc5-cf1a9a017a67)
In September 1535 Henry’s agents were back in Oxford as part of a whirlwind tour of the country in preparation for the dissolution of the monasteries and by now the bloodshed had begun. In July of that year one of Oxford’s most illustrious former scholars, Sir Thomas More, was executed on Tower Hill, a victim of the new Treason Act: a piece of legislation that efficiently turned loyalty to the Pope in Rome into treachery to the English State. More’s scruples did not trouble Henry’s agents, though: Dr Richard Layton, ‘a cleric of salacious tastes’, and his assistant, John Tregwell, brought with them to Oxford an estate agent’s eye for a property and a prospector’s nose for gold, neatly masked behind an official mandate to root out opposition to the King’s new church. Their report, when it came, hit the university a sickening blow.
The first wave of the dissolution saw all of Oxford’s religious houses shut down: the Benedictine-run Canterbury, Durham and Gloucester Colleges, and the Cistercian-run St Bernard’s College. Their assets were stripped, their real estate sold off to the highest bidder and their inhabitants turned out onto the streets. Scores of academics and undergraduates now found themselves jobless, homeless and penniless. Hard hit too were the university libraries. College after college was ransacked for its illuminated books (seen as symbols of a despised papist idolatry), which were then carried out in cartloads and destroyed. In New College quadrangle the pages of the scattered medieval manuscripts blew thick as the autumn leaves, reported Layton. One enterprising student, a Master Greenefeld from Buckinghamshire, gathered them up and used them to make ‘Sewells or Blanshers [game-scarers] to keep the Deer within the wood, and thereby to have better cry with his hounds.’
Oxford reeled under this attack. The developing university had drawn the wealth of the monasteries to the city. Those same monasteries had spawned the abbeys and priories, and they, in turn, had financed the building of Oxford’s first academic halls. And so the university and the city had grown. Even the newer, secular colleges, which escaped the cull but were bludgeoned into a show of loyalty, were dependent on the Church revenue now being siphoned into the Crown’s coffers. The destruction of the monasteries brought academic chaos to Oxford. More pertinently, it also brought festering resentment.
Some fourteen years later, in 1549, royal agents called on Oxford again. This time they were Edward VI’s visitors, come to enforce his new Prayer Book, the first real doctrinal step towards Protestantism.* (#ulink_13d3c6f1-5ef8-5229-bd5f-0d5f027a79a3) Hot on their heels came the German and Swiss mercenary forces of Lord Grey of Wilton. Let Oxford be in no doubt that this regime meant business. Of the thirteen heads of those Oxford colleges still remaining, the visitors could find only two who supported the Government’s religious policy; as the Protestant reformer, Peter Martyr, remarked: ‘the Oxford men…are still pertinaciously sticking in the mud of popery’. But events soon proved that Oxford men were not the only stick-in-the-muds. July of that year burnt with the heat of a countrywide rebellion. On 12 July the Duke of Somerset wrote to Lord Russell, to lament the ‘stir here in Bucks. and Oxfordshire by instigation of sundry priests (keep it to yourself)’. Lord Russell scarcely had time to broadcast the news; just six days later Grey’s mercenaries had quickly and ruthlessly put out the fires. The eleven-year-old King Edward noted gleefully in his journal that Lord Grey ‘did so abash the rebels, that more than half of them ran their ways, and other [sic] that tarried were some slain, some taken and some hanged’. Grey left careful instruction that ‘after execution done the heads of every of them…to be set up in the highest place for the more terror of the said evil people’. The vicars of Chipping Norton and of Bloxham were hanged from the steeples of their own churches, and Johann Ulmer, a Swiss medical student at Christ Church College, wrote home to his patron, the Zurich reformer Heinrich Bullinger, that ‘the Oxfordshire papists are at last reduced to order, many of them having been apprehended, and some gibbeted, and their heads fastened to the walls’.
The purges soon followed. Magdalen College lost its president, Dr Owen Oglethorpe, forced out in favour of a suitable Protestant candidate. Christ Church lost John Clement, a former tutor in the household of Sir Thomas More, who now fled to the university at Louvain in the Spanish Netherlands to join the growing community of Oxford disaffected there. Corpus Christi lost its dean and its president, both arrested and carried off to London, one to the Marshalsea prison for seditious preaching, the other to the Fleet prison for using the old form of service on the preceding Corpus Christi day. These were not the only expulsions and Oxford braced itself for a stormy future.
And then the weather turned. On 6 July 1553 Edward died, and the chill winds of reform swung southerly, blowing before them, back from the Continent, the exiles of Oxford: Oglethorpe back to Magdalen, Clement back to practise medicine in Essex. They passed on the dockside a new generation of Oxford men, John Jewel of Corpus Christi, Christopher Goodman, the Lady Margaret Professor, off into exile in their turn, as Queen Mary immediately rescinded her brother’s statutes. The next five years brought calm to a city that basked in the warmth of the sovereign’s personal favour. They also brought prosperity. Mary tripled the university’s revenue and oversaw the foundation of two new colleges, Trinity and St John’s, in place of the ruined Durham and St Bernard’s.
At Corpus Christi the ornaments and vestments hidden from sight during Edward’s reign were triumphantly returned to the college chapel. Communion tables were quickly removed and replaced with new altars; the ‘6 psalms in English’, the ‘great Bible’ and the ‘book of Communion’—all of which had been demanded by Edward’s visitors—were destroyed; and, all around Oxford, people picked up the pieces of lives rudely shattered by statute from London. When ex-Bishops Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley, and the former Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer, were sent to Oxford for trial, it was signal proof that Mary never doubted the city’s loyalty. That the Government wished to demonstrate in an academic setting the shortcomings of doctrinal heresy and that all the accused were from Cambridge merely underlined the wisdom of the decision. When the three men were burnt in a ditch opposite Balliol College it had little impact on the watching crowd—Latimer’s ‘candle’ of martyrdom found a marked lack of oxygen in Oxford.
Mary was swept into power on a wave of popular support, but she found herself left high and dry on virgin sand as England’s first queen regnant since Matilda’s ill-fated attempt to assert her claim to her father, Henry I’s throne. Matilda had plunged the nation into a nineteen-year civil war; throughout the last bitter summer of Mary’s reign Englishmen can have felt only relief that they had got away so lightly this time around. Still, the previous five years had brought more than their fair share of misery. On her accession Mary had commanded her ‘loving Subjects, to live together in quiet Sort, and Christian Charity, leaving those new found devilish Terms of Papist or Heretic’. Her first Parliament had seemed to speak for the majority of her people. Then had come marriage to the reviled King Philip of Spain, the burning of Protestants and a disastrous war with France, and now those same people, the stench of the execution pyres fresh in their nostrils, awaited her death with impatience. On 17 November 1558 it finally came and ‘all the churches in London did ring and at night [the people] did make bonfires and set tables in the street and did eat and drink and make merry for the new Queen’, wrote Machyn in his diary. At just twenty-five years old, though, that new young queen, Elizabeth, was very much an unknown quantity. While London celebrated, Oxford held its breath and waited for what the royal visitors would bring.
On Christmas Day 1558, just weeks into the new reign, Dr Owen Oglethorpe of Magdalen, now Bishop of Carlisle and the officiating divine for the festivities, received a message from Queen Elizabeth asking him not to elevate the consecrated host at High Mass that day. The Spanish ambassador, Count de Feria, reported Oglethorpe’s refusal to comply with the request: ‘Her Majesty was mistress of his body and life, but not of his conscience’. Elizabeth heard mass that day until the gospel had been read and then, as Oglethorpe prepared to celebrate the transformation of bread to body and wine to blood, she rose and left the royal chapel. To those who watched and waited this was the first public indication of which way the Queen might jump.
If Elizabeth herself had wanted a sign of how the battle lines were forming she need not have looked far. Mary’s death had brought with it a flurry of bag packing in Geneva, Zurich, Strasbourg and Frankfurt, the centres of Protestantism, as the exiles from the previous reign prepared to return home. After all, Elizabeth, like her brother Edward, had been educated from childhood in the new religion. Meanwhile, the opposing camp was quick to make its objections felt. At Mary’s funeral the Bishop of Winchester praised the dead monarch as a good and loyal daughter of the true Church, referring to Elizabeth, throughout, as ‘the other sister’. He laid down his challenge to the new Queen, a challenge peculiar to her sex, in the bluntest of terms: ‘How can I, a woman, be head of the church, who, by Scripture, am forbidden to speak in church, except the church shall have a dumb head?’ At Elizabeth’s coronation the Archbishop of York refused to officiate and only Owen Oglethorpe could be persuaded to perform the ceremony. And in France King Henri II, who had ordered that the arms of England should be quartered with those of Scotland upon the marriage of Mary Stuart to the Dauphin, now encouraged his son and daughter-in-law to style themselves King and Queen of England.
Was Elizabeth’s choice of religion ever really in doubt then? She was the daughter of the ‘concubine Anne Boleyn’, the woman for whom Henry VIII had broken with Rome in the first place. Her parents’ marriage had never been recognized by the Catholic Church and her own legitimacy of birth had long been a subject for parliamentary enactment. Just days before her mother’s execution Thomas Cranmer had annulled her parents’ marriage and Elizabeth, at a stroke, was both bastardized and disinherited. Her present claim to the throne rested on her father’s will and the Succession Act of 1543, which reinstated her as Henry’s heir, and the French, in particular, were quick to cast doubts on Parliament’s right to tamper with these sacred laws of inheritance—by Christmas 1558 they ‘did not let to say and talk openly that Her Highness is not lawful Queen of England and that they have already sent to Rome to disprove her right’, wrote Lord Cobham, Elizabeth’s envoy in Paris.
The French had indeed sent to Rome. By the New Year Sir Edward Carne was reporting back from the Holy City that ‘the ambassador of the French laboreth the Pope to declare the Queen illegitimate and the Scottish Queen successor to Queen Mary’. That the French chose to object to Elizabeth’s claim out of political self-interest rather than religious scruple was not in question: they had raised similar doubts about the legitimacy of Elizabeth’s sister Mary when Henry VIII tried to engineer an overly advantageous marriage treaty between her and the Duc d’Orléans. But their challenge to her title underlined Elizabeth’s quandary. If she wished to retain papal supremacy in England she would need to throw herself on the mercy of the Pope. Paul IV had intimated that he was quite ready to consider her claim to her title, but could she really stomach the indignity of going cap in hand to Rome, begging to be excused her bastardy? And could she afford to begin her reign from a position of such weakness? Surely England’s throne was her birthright and no Pope could grant her dispensation to wear the crown? So ‘the wolves of Geneva’ packing to return home to England knew from the start that the odds on Elizabeth seeking a national religion, independent of Rome, were short enough for them to stake their lives on. Now they came back in readiness for that outcome.
They did not have long to wait. On 8 May 1559 Elizabeth dissolved the first Parliament of her reign, giving royal assent to those acts from which her new Church would take its shape: the Act of Supremacy, which settled on Elizabeth the title of Supreme Governor of that Church, and the Act of Uniformity, which agreed the doctrine it should follow.
The reactions followed swiftly. ‘A leaden mediocrity,’ wrote the newly returned Protestant, John Jewel. ‘The Papacy was never abolished…but rather transferred to the sovereign,’ wrote Theodore Béza in Geneva to Heinrich Bullinger in Zurich. From the first, Elizabeth’s was a Protestant settlement that failed to please the Protestants. But neither did it please the Catholics. ‘Religion here now is simply a question of policy’, wrote the Bishop of Aquila from London, ‘and in a hundred thousand ways they let us see that they neither love us nor fear us.’ John Jewel expressed his surprise that ‘the ranks of the papists have fallen almost of their own accord’, and Count de Feria wrote sadly home to Spain to explain why: ‘The Catholics are in a great majority in the country, and if the leading men in it were not of so small account things would have turned out differently.’* (#ulink_a04b00f7-fbb5-5ca6-bd18-39114159def7) And in London a zealous mob went on the rampage, stripping the capital’s churches of their statues and stained-glass windows ‘as if it had been the sacking of some hostile city’.
From the start Elizabeth’s religious settlement was a compromise. Like all compromises it failed to satisfy anyone and like all compromises it would be subjected to stresses and strains as each dissatisfied party tried, in turn, to wrest back the advantage. But it is the fact that there was need for a compromise that is of significance to this story, because it suggests a country divided into pressure groups of equal fighting weight.
The religious changes of the English Reformation, so decisive and so devastating for a select few in key positions of authority, had filtered slowly through the rest of the country, dependent upon the efficiency and willingness of those officers charged with their enforcement. By 1558 England’s religious spectrum was a kaleidoscope of colours ranging all the way from the most Roman of purples to Puritan grey. It is impossible to estimate the precise number of confirmed Catholics and Protestants, together with the number of relative indifferents, in England at Elizabeth’s succession. It is equally impossible to arrive at a precise and consistent definition for English Catholicism or English Protestantism at this time: these were not hermetic terms upon which everyone could agree and with which everyone could identify. Indeed it is unlikely that everyone could have told you what they were, Catholic or Protestant, if questioned. It is highly probable that in reaching a compromise settlement the Government paid close attention to the predictable response of the powerful and predatory Catholic nations of Europe. But it is certain that such a compromise would not have been necessary had England not been divided, top to bottom, on this matter of religion. The England Elizabeth inherited was definitely not a Protestant country.
For every Londoner in the largely pro-Protestant capital who went on a spree of vandalism, there was someone else in the shires and villages quietly secreting away the statues, crucifixes and church plate for happier times. For anyone in the south of England—and close to the seat of government—prepared to toe the party line if it led to promotion, there was someone else in the north of the country and far from influence, stubbornly doing as he pleased. For anyone whose heart belonged to Geneva and who felt they had been betrayed by the Queen, there was another whose heart belonged to Rome, who was smarting just as badly. And for Elizabeth, whose heart belonged firmly to England, the challenge lay in holding these two opposing forces in their precarious balance long enough to allow civil divisions to heal over and to effect the urgently needed overhaul of the country’s economy and the repair of its diplomatic relations with the rest of Europe. Because the twenty-five-year-old Queen can have been in little doubt that, as far as Europe was concerned, she and England were in for a turbulent future.
And for the ordinary man and woman in the street, the challenge lay in working out precisely what was required of them by this latest change to the national religion.
On the face of it these requirements were simple. The new Act of Uniformity demanded each subject’s presence at their parish church every Sunday and holy day. Failure to do so, without reasonable excuse, would result in a twelve pence fine for each offence, or the ‘censure of the church’ and possible excommunication, with the consequent loss of civil rights.
Going to church on a Sunday had long been a tradition inspired by faith but enforced by the ecclesiastical courts and over the centuries the machinery of that enforcement had become powerfully efficient: the long arm of the Church’s law reached the full length and breadth of England. It was this machinery, in place, fully operational and re-greased with parliamentary drive in place of holy oil, that Elizabeth’s ministers now used to unseat the religion that had devised it: the Catholic Church in England was hoist with its own petard.
There were other requirements too. Subjects were not to speak in a derogatory fashion about the new Prayer Book, nor to cause a clergyman to use any other form of weekly liturgy than the one specified by the Queen’s officers. The penalties for this were fines of 100, then 400 marks, and, thereafter, life imprisonment. And they were not to be caught defending the papal supremacy; not unless they were prepared to forfeit first their goods, then their liberty, then their life.
But so long as they kept their weekly appointment at the Queen’s new Church and their mouths tightly shut, there was nothing to stop them benefiting from Elizabeth’s lenient attitude towards Catholicism. And this was lenience rather than a move towards outright religious tolerance—a lenience born of political realism. There was no question that Elizabeth wanted to eliminate the Catholic Church in England. There were few, if any, sixteenth century monarchs who could afford to tolerate so strong a rival within their own dominions and Elizabeth’s crown was more vulnerable than most. But realistically this was not going to happen overnight. So the Oath of Supremacy was tendered to all office holders. Anyone who could not swear ‘that the queen is the only supreme governor of this realm…as well in all spiritual or ecclesiastical things…as temporal’ was evicted from that office and denied any further position in the new administration, but elsewhere Elizabeth’s behaviour remained conciliatory.
Deleted from the new Prayer Book was the offensive Edwardian reference to ‘the tyranny of the Bishop of Rome’. The new Communion service became a careful amalgam of phrases from successive earlier prayer books. It was a mouthful to say—‘The body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul into everlasting life: and take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on him in thine heart by faith, with thanksgiving’—but it remained sufficiently ambiguous to satisfy both those who believed in the real presence in the sacrament and those who denied it. Churchgoers seeking the Virgin Mary were offered a newer and more vital virgin to adore: ‘they keep the birthday of queen Elizabeth in the most solemn way on the 7th day of September, which is the eve of the feast of the Mother of God’, wrote the Catholic Edward Rishton. And although the churches were stripped of their decoration, they still hung on to ‘the organs, the ecclesiastical chants, the crucifix, copes, [and] candles’. Rishton observed: ‘The queen retained many of the ancient customs and ceremonies…partly for the honour and illustration of this new church, and partly for the sake of persuading her own subjects and foreigners into the belief that she was not far…from the Catholic faith.’ It convinced the French ambassador. He wrote home, duly impressed, that the English ‘were in religion very nigh to them’. And, Rishton added, ‘the Queen and her ministers considered themselves most fortunate in that those who clung to…[Catholicism]…publicly accepted, or by their presence outwardly sanctioned, in some way, the new rites they had prescribed. They did not care so much about the inward belief of these men.’ No one, it seemed, was keen to start opening windows into men’s souls at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign.
And if the new Anglican Church was built upon the bedrock of compromise, then many who attended it did so in the same spirit. When, in the summer of 1562, a number of prominent Catholics approached the Spanish ambassador, and through him Rome, to ask if they might worship in the Queen’s new Church, the answer they received (in the negative) was not considered absolute enough to act upon, so worship there they did. When many local priests became aware of the level of Catholic feeling in their parishes they made adjustments accordingly; so Catholics might have ‘Mass said secretly in their own houses by those very priests who in church publicly celebrated the [Protestant] liturgy’. To compromise made sound political sense.
But could it ever make spiritual sense? The notorious sixteenth century Cambridge academic, Dr Andrew Perne of Peterhouse, ‘was known to have changed his religion three or four times to suit the change of ruler’, but when Perne was asked by a close friend ‘to tell her honestly and simply which was the holy religion that would see her safe to heaven’, he replied, ‘I beg you never to tell anyone what I am going to say…If you wish, you can live in the religion which the Queen and the whole kingdom profess—you will have a good life, you will have none of the vexations which Catholics have to suffer. But don’t die in it. Die in faith and communion with the Catholic Church, that is, if you want to save your soul.’ Perne never had the chance to heed his own advice: he died suddenly, on the way back to his room after dining with the Archbishop of Canterbury, caught out not only in the wrong faith, but also in the headquarters of that faith, Lambeth Palace itself. But this was the dilemma facing all Englishmen now: how did you square your political survival with your spiritual salvation, if, like vast numbers of your fellow countrymen, you still regarded yourself as Catholic? Happy were those whose conscience and the law agreed. For those others, the future, both in this world and the next, looked much more uncertain.
In November 1561, three years into Elizabeth’s reign, the mayor of Oxford had the unpleasant task of informing the Privy Council that ‘there were not three houses in [Oxford] that were not filled with papists’. And, added the new Spanish ambassador, Bishop Alvaro de la Quadra, in his regular gossip-filled letter to the Duchess of Parma, ‘the Council were far from pleased, and told the Mayor to take care not to say such a thing elsewhere’. But to those with any knowledge of the city’s past, this level of defiance will have come as no surprise: Oxford was running true to form. Deep in the cellars below the Mitre Inn on the High Street, at the Swan Inn, the Star Inn and the Catherine Wheel, Oxford’s Catholics were meeting in secret and in droves to celebrate their forbidden mass.* (#ulink_bb3a3b5b-a54f-599d-a6bc-fc396c91b792)
If the city of Oxford was reluctant to embrace the new Church, then its university was proving even more mutinous. In May 1559 the Swiss Protestant Heinrich Bullinger was confidentially advised against sending his son to college at Oxford, for ‘it is as yet a den of thieves, and of those who hate the light’. That same month John Jewel, now Bishop of Salisbury, was noting with some frustration that ‘our universities are in a most lamentable condition: there are not above two in Oxford of our sentiments’. And when Elizabeth’s visitors arrived at the university that year to enforce the new religious settlement, they were daunted by the strength of Catholic opposition they encountered.
At New College they avoided asking everyone to subscribe to the Oaths of Supremacy and Uniformity for fear of the number of refusals, reported Nicholas Sanders, a fellow of that college. The Bishop of Winchester, the visitor responsible for New College, found similar hostility at his other wards, Trinity, Corpus Christi and Magdalen. Here, too, he declined to look closely. Instead, he and his fellow visitors concentrated their attention on what they saw as the root of the problem: the men in charge. Within two years only one of Oxford’s college heads appointed during the previous reign remained in office and with that the Council seemed to be content. Let these new replacements keep their house in order and play the heavy hand. That the sole surviving college to retain its Marian head, New College, was the scene of widespread, Council-led purges throughout the first decade of the reign merely seemed to support the wisdom of the Government’s policy.
Then fate stepped in to send the precarious balance of European power reeling. In July 1559 an unlucky tilt at a French court tournament left King Henri II dead, his fifteen-year-old heir, François, in the sway of his zealous cousins the Guises, and his teenage daughter-in-law, Mary Stuart, sufficiently emboldened to have herself heralded with cries of ‘Make way for the Queen of England!’ A nettled Elizabeth was soon persuaded by her Council to send money to help the Protestant, anti-French rebellion in Scotland and quickly the situation spiralled into open confrontation.
In early 1560, mindful of the need to present a strong show of national unity in times of danger and fearful that the conflict had fallen far too neatly into battle lines of an awkwardly religious nature, Elizabeth sent her visitors back to Oxford. Soon Bishop de la Quadra was reporting home that ‘Oxford students…[known to be Catholic]…have been taken…[and imprisoned]…in great numbers’. Was this how it was going to be from now on? Each time an enemy threatened was any Englishman not seen to be standing foursquare behind the Queen’s new church and openly obeying her laws liable to arrest and imprisonment? The detention of six Oxford students the following year, for resisting the mayor’s attempts to remove their college crucifix, seemed to confirm this. As Elizabeth braced herself for the return home to Scotland of the newly widowed Mary, it was more the openness of the students’ defiance that earned them their prison sentence: after all, the ultra-conservative Elizabeth still kept a crucifix in her own royal chapel.
A pattern was being established, a pattern that those English Catholics arrested for attending mass at the French embassy in February 1560, even as the situation in Scotland worsened, might have been able to spot for themselves. The rationale behind it was simple. Had England’s fortunes been entirely separate from those of Europe then Elizabeth and her government could have been content to settle back and let the dismantling of the English Catholic Church be a gradual one, sure in the knowledge that in time the majority of their countrymen would come round to their way of thinking. But England was as entangled with the rest of Europe as religion ever was with politics.* (#ulink_f536bbcf-37ca-5227-bab7-641aaf46db88) It was a part of the Christian Church, the Church that had bound Europe together. That Church was now divided into factions and while Europe was still known as Christendom, England, like it or not, was integral to that factional struggle. And it was vital to Europe’s equilibrium: its fragile diplomatic alliances with France and Spain in turn keeping either of those two nations from ever singly dominating the European stage—a necessity for Europe, but a constant irritation to successive generations of ambitious French and Spanish monarchs.
With this the case, conflict was inevitable. For though Elizabeth might have no stomach for religious persecution, still she needed to keep her throne safe from predatory interlopers from across the narrow English Channel. And though England’s Catholics might be loyal to England, still they began to find themselves the focus of increasing and unwelcome Government-imposed restrictions every time affairs in mainland Europe took a turn for the worse.
But if this was a pattern that would emerge more clearly as Elizabeth’s reign progressed, then Oxford’s particular place within that pattern was predictable from the start. And from the start Elizabeth tried to forestall it.
On Saturday, 31 August 1566, ‘about 5 or 6 of the clock at night’, Queen Elizabeth I rode into Oxford. Her wooing of the city, and its university, had begun.
At the head of the royal procession were the Queen’s heralds. Behind them came the Earl of Leicester, in his official role as Chancellor of the university, then the Mayor of Oxford and his party of aldermen, the noblemen of the court, and finally Elizabeth herself. Her
‘chariot was open on all sides, and on a gilded seat in the height of regal magnificence reposed the Queen. Her head-dress was a marvel of woven gold, and glittered with pearls and other wonderful gems; her gown was of the most brilliant scarlet silk woven with gold, partly concealed by a purple cloak lined with ermine after the manner of a triumphal robe. Beside the chariot rode the royal cursitors, resplendent in coats of cloth of gold, and the marshals, who were kept busy preventing the crowds from pressing too near to the person of the Queen…The royal guard, magnificent in gold and scarlet, brought up the rear. Of these there were about two hundred…and on their shoulders they bore…iron clubs like battle-axes.’
Through the north gate they streamed. Down Northgate Street (now Cornmarket), where the scholars who lined the road sank awe-struck to their knees and called out Vivat Regina Elizabetha, hearing their cry taken up by the townspeople leaning from the windows and crammed precariously together on the roof-tops above them. To Carfax, where Giles Lawrence, Oxford’s Regius Professor, welcomed the Queen with an oration in Greek to which Elizabeth responded warmly in the same tongue, thanking Lawrence for his speech and praising it as the best she had heard in that language, adding coyly ‘we would answer you presently, but with this great company we are somewhat abashed’. Lawrence was transfixed.
On down Fish Street (St Aldates) the procession flowed, to Christ Church College, where the gate and walls were festooned with verses in Latin and Greek in admiration of Elizabeth and where, beneath a canopy borne by four Doctors of the university, the Queen was ushered slowly across the quadrangle into the cool and calm of the great cathedral. Here Elizabeth knelt in prayer as Dr Godwin, Christ Church’s Dean, gave thanks for her safe arrival in the city. To the sound of cornets the choir sang the Te Deum and then wearily Elizabeth slipped away through the gardens in the lengthening dusk, to her lodgings in the east wing, to prepare for this, her latest charm offensive.
It was the Queen’s first visit to Oxford. An earlier attempt two years before had been called off at the last moment when plague broke out in the city. But this delay merely ensured that by the time Elizabeth made her dramatic appearance at the north gate anticipation had grown to fever pitch. It also meant that those charged with arranging the visit had left little to chance.
On the Wednesday before the Queen’s arrival the Earl of Leicester and Sir William Cecil had ridden the eight miles from the Palace of Woodstock to Oxford, through the sluicing rain of a late summer downpour, to check for themselves that everything was in order. Leicester, as Oxford’s Chancellor, was host for the week and with his ambition to marry the Queen still intact at this date—just five years earlier, with his brother-in-law acting as go-between, he had approached the Spanish ambassador and offered to return England to the Catholic Church if Spain backed their wedding, a far cry from his later reincarnation as the scourge of English Catholicism—there was more at stake for him here than mere proprietorial embarrassment should Oxford’s hospitality fail to please the Queen. But for Sir William Cecil, Elizabeth’s Principal Secretary of State and her chief adviser on all policies relating to Church and foreign affairs, Oxford’s performance was a matter for greater concern still.
Each day of the royal visit Elizabeth and her entourage would attend debates and disputations, the art of which formed the basis of every student’s education. On the Tuesday a rising young Oxford star, Edmund Campion of St John’s College, would triumph in the Natural Philosophy Disputation, proposing ‘that the tides are caused by the moon’s motion’. Elizabeth, who in later life would be revered as the moon goddess, Cynthia, the ‘wide ocean’s empress’, was delighted with Campion’s speech; Cecil and Leicester immediately offered to become his patrons.* (#ulink_aeccd0f6-b918-5271-baef-e801c3d14772) But it was indicative of the Government’s continued anxiety over the problem of Oxford’s religious insubordination that Cecil had provided the students in advance with a list of preferred subjects for these debates. Thursday’s Divinity Disputation took as its Council-chosen theme ‘Whether subjects may fight against wicked princes?’, allowing little scope for awkward theological reasoning.† (#ulink_e97aec44-d208-527d-b26b-ac515888dc3f) It would have been a brave—and short-lived—undergraduate who dared to denounce Elizabeth’s break with Rome as wicked to her face; more embarrassing and more damaging still to the royal party would have been a spirited and unopposed defence of the Catholic faith. Oxford’s young students were to be given little opportunity to air their religious grievances.
But Elizabeth favoured the carrot over the stick whenever possible. In addition she held a deep and unshakeable regard for learning and was determined to see Oxford back in the vanguard of European scholarship after so many decades in the wilderness of religious upheaval.* (#ulink_1ae8934a-d767-58fb-8369-7f6e7deb5690) She had a captive audience of some seventeen hundred students—all of whom had elected to remain at the university despite the term being officially over—and if any queen knew how to entrance an audience it was Elizabeth.
So Edmund Campion won his court patronage. George Coriat won half a sovereign. Tobie Matthew of Christ Church won the coveted title of Queen’s Scholar, which led to a lifetime of royal preferment and his eventual appointment as Archbishop of York. And all of them won the lavish praise and attention of a queen acutely conscious that her visit needed to serve as a fast-acting panacea for the ills afflicting Oxford. There was banqueting each evening and boisterous theatre in Christ Church’s Great Hall, transformed for the occasion into a gleaming, golden ‘Roman palace’. And then there was Elizabeth’s own speech, given at the church of St Mary the Virgin before the entire university on the final evening of her stay—a speech delivered in faultless, eloquent Latin, a speech in honour of Oxford and of academia, a speech that was welcomed and applauded with unqualified enthusiasm.
As Elizabeth rode out of Oxford the following day, surrounded once again by her glittering procession and by a city liberally hung with verses expressing grief at her departure, she had done much to heal the old wounds left by her father and her brother’s brutal and bullish enforcement of religious change. Her leave-taking was as sincere as it was warm: ‘Farewell, the worthy University of Oxford; farewell, my good subjects there; farewell, my dear Scholars, and pray God prosper your studies.’ Few could have done better under the circumstances. The only problem was it had all taken place several years too late.
Five years before Elizabeth’s visit a twenty-nine-year-old Lancastrian, a one-time student of Oriel College and former principal of St Mary’s Hall, had left Oxford for Flanders and the Low Countries. There, he was a welcome addition to the exiles of Louvain. And there, just seven years later, at the university town of Douai in the province of Artois, he would rent a ‘large…and very convenient’ house from where he would attempt to turn the ebbing fortunes of English Catholicism. ‘We cannot’, he would later write, ‘wait for better times; we must act now (to make them better).’ If the recalcitrant students of Oxford were to be summarily expelled from college whenever Europe threatened and if the men and women of England were to continue compromising their salvation in the name of political survival, then Dr William Allen had found the answer: use the former to educate the latter. It was a simple solution and it would prove devastatingly effective.
* (#ulink_72d8d164-b07f-5b22-9fbc-c965dd843ae6) When Thomas Cromwell was made Chancellor of Cambridge in 1535, on the execution of Cardinal John Fisher, Oxford graduates saw Government preferment steered past them towards the students of Cambridge.
* (#ulink_09b9c0f2-26ec-531f-8605-f19170ee8192) Each college was provided at its foundation with an external ‘visitor’—part trouble-shooting ombudsman, part spiritual inquisitor.
* (#ulink_94bc8e37-daae-591e-9482-8822cee90f96) De Feria believed that the leading Catholics, in both the Commons and the Lords, had failed to put up a convincing fight during the crucial parliamentary debates from which the settlement sprang. However the Catholics were also under-represented in these debates: ten out of the twenty-six bishoprics were empty when Parliament opened on 25 January.
* (#ulink_c991a398-9e72-5200-9127-fb0a86465e23) Mrs Williams of the Swan was more than usually defiant in receiving Catholic priests: her husband was a justice of the peace and a city alderman.
* (#ulink_296c5835-bb22-5c0b-ada0-75782338b121) England’s sense of growing isolation from the rest of Europe, in spite of these entanglements, features strongly in the State Papers of the time. The Spanish ambassador reported back to Philip II a speech made by Sir William Cecil to the House of Commons in 1563, in which Cecil declared, ‘They had no one now to trust but themselves, for the Germans, although they had promised the Queen great things, had done nothing and had broken their word.’
* (#ulink_affaf761-244b-512f-9d3d-08848e4483ff) She is depicted as such in the Rainbow Portrait of c.1600 and was the subject of Walter Ralegh’s Book of the Ocean to Cynthia, in which he describes the anguished nature of his relationship with the Queen.
† (#ulink_affaf761-244b-512f-9d3d-08848e4483ff) Cecil’s own choice of suitably non-controversial debating matter for the week ahead was ‘Why is ophthalmia catching, but not dropsy or gout?’
* (#ulink_d5f97405-85dd-53a3-8dc0-8c2a16f81426) At the start of the sixteenth century Erasmus had placed English learning second only to that found in the Italian universities. Elizabeth’s concern over the standard of education in England extended as far as exempting schoolmasters from paying tax.
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Alice Hogge
A thrilling account of treachery, loyalty and martyrdom in Elizabethan England from an exceptional new writer.As darkness fell on the evening of Friday, 28 October 1588, just weeks after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, two young Englishmen landed in secret on a Norfolk beach. They were Jesuit priests. Their aim was to achieve by force of argument what the Armada had failed to do by force of arms: return England to the Catholic Church.Eighteen years later their mission had been shattered by the actions of a small group of terrorists, the Gunpowder Plotters; they themselves had been accused of designing ‘that most horrid and hellish conspiracy’; and the future of every Catholic they had come to save depended on the silence of an Oxford joiner, builder of priest-holes, being tortured in the Tower of London.‘God’s Secret Agents’ tells the story of Elizabeth’s ‘other’ England, a country at war with an unseen enemy, a country peopled – according to popular pamphlets and Government proclamations – with potential traitors, fifth-columnists and assassins. And it tells this story from the perspective of that unseen ‘enemy’, England’s Catholics, a beleaguered, alienated minority, struggling to uphold its faith.Ultimately, ‘God’s Secret Agents’ is the story of men who would die for their cause undone by men who would kill for it.
GOD’S SECRET AGENTS
Queen Elizabeth’s Forbidden Priests and the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot
ALICE HOGGE
To Nicholas Fordham
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#u0e3a3c5b-dcc2-5d36-8d09-6a26f454cae0)
Title Page (#ufb325db8-6a1f-56ed-a514-87aad3148a83)
Dedication (#uf2a5688b-a7cb-5dbf-85af-4fba6f7fe3de)
One (#u1d1620ef-d0ac-5de0-9d9e-a6bdd8f03494)
Two (#u7dcd5ade-e7bc-594d-8dfb-00b3175e75fa)
Three (#u58df4db6-739a-54e8-83c1-0bc5c607357f)
Four (#ueb5e1b9f-f7da-5bf9-b082-3ddd52964dc9)
Five (#uedc82625-6246-530c-bb0a-695b57d94d6c)
Six (#uf1d99234-4a68-5798-8dd6-a6f6eb6c157a)
Seven (#u134b07bd-07ea-540b-a82e-e59a626ffb35)
Eight (#u232c2ee7-5f08-5b71-8e93-e30760cbbe2b)
Nine (#u837fd214-51e6-5c5f-ae7c-fb67ccf841f8)
Ten (#uf751180e-20a6-5e0a-a567-24cb895d62cb)
Eleven (#u5845e4ba-2a59-58a8-8585-d353409577ed)
Twelve (#uc59aab07-077e-5557-a3d4-d9b32ba53c4c)
Epilogue (#u4289f1d1-ac32-53a5-b44a-31d50fa456fd)
Author’s Note (#u214f1adf-ecd5-509c-9d63-1a45747e4610)
Appendix (#u24a0cf86-31a1-5d0a-9185-03be1b5a20a6)
Endnotes (#uddc78c88-db2c-55c9-9bbe-3afad4a6cc32)
Bibliography (#uc65eaed6-4f59-5a39-8132-80debc66a3bb)
Index (#u7d2d15a8-9463-5f1c-95e7-77c231c4732e)
Acknowledgements (#u40a45da5-c3b5-5f6f-a765-fb20f44c1c28)
About the Author (#u33449ea7-5e5c-5012-bfe0-164ac4251f24)
Copyright (#u74e1b124-1901-5402-99de-edbf258b17f7)
About the Publisher (#u60dae651-1148-5290-b3b6-652d7fb84a3f)
One (#ulink_f075f37c-00ee-5366-aca0-4ee4a839eb4b)
‘…as the waves of the sea, without stay, do one rise and overtake another,
so the Pope and his…ministers be never at rest, but as fast as one
enterprise faileth they take another in hand…hoping at last to prevail.’
Sir Walter Mildmay MP, October 1586
ARMADA YEAR, 1588, swept in on a flood tide of historical prophecies and dire predictions. For the numerologists, who divided the Christian calendar into vast, looping cycles of time, constructed in multiples of seven and ten and based on the Revelation of St John and the bloodier parts of the Book of Isaiah, the year offered nothing less than the opening of the Seventh Seal, the overthrow of Antichrist and the sounding of the trumpets for the Last Judgement.
For the fifteenth century mathematician Regiomontanus, although he had not been quite so specific about the year’s unfolding, still the promise of a solar eclipse in February, and not one but two lunar eclipses in March and August had not, he had thought, augured well.* (#ulink_9e30017e-f800-55b8-87c4-0ef0a76cdef0) Regiomontanus had recorded his findings in Latin verse, concluding: ‘If, this year, total catastrophe does not befall, if land and sea do not collapse in total ruin, yet will the whole world suffer in upheavals, empires will dwindle and from everywhere will be great lamentation.’ As the year began, in Prague the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, himself a keen astrologer, scanned the heavens for signs that his was not the empire to which Regiomontanus referred. He could discover little more than that the weather that year would be unseasonably bad.
The printers of Amsterdam rang in the year with a special edition of their annual almanac, detailing in lurid prose the coming disasters: tempests and floods, midsummer snowstorms, darkness at midday, rain clouds of blood, monstrous births, and strange convulsions of the earth. On a more positive note, they suggested that things would calm down a bit after August and that late autumn might even be lucky for some, but this was not a January horoscope many read with pleasure.
In Spain and Portugal the sailors assembling along the western seaboard talked of little else, no matter that their King, His Most Catholic Majesty Philip II of Spain, regarded all attempts to divine the future as impious. In Lisbon a fortune-teller was arrested for ‘making false and discouraging predictions’, but the arrest came too late: the year had already begun with a flurry of naval desertions. In the Basque ports Philip’s recruiting drive slowed and halted ‘because of many strange and frightening portents that are rumoured’.
In Rome it was brought to the attention of Pope Sixtus V that a recent earth tremor in England had just disgorged an ancient marble slab, concealed for centuries beneath the crypt of Glastonbury Abbey, on which were written in letters of fire the opening words of Regiomontanus’ prediction. It was felt by the papal agent who delivered this report that the mathematician could not, therefore, be the original author of the verses and that the prophecy could stem from one source only: from the magician Merlin. It was the first hint that God might be on the side of the English.
But in England no one mentioned Merlin’s intervention in international affairs and the English almanacs that year were strangely muted affairs, proffering the general observation that ‘Here and in the quarters following might be noted…many strange events to happen which purposely are omitted in good consideration.’ With their fellow printers in Amsterdam working round the clock to meet the public’s demand for gruesome predictions, it seems odd the English press were grown so coy, particularly when the editor of Holinshed’s Chronicles had written the year before that Regiomontanus’ prophecy was ‘rife in every man’s mouth’. But it was not in the Government’s interest that England should be flooded with stories of death and destruction, for it was all too likely that any day now it would be visited by the real thing.* (#ulink_cb6f67f3-4f8a-5a2f-91f2-aed1ceb2f221)
For some four years now England and Spain had been at war: an undeclared phoney war, fought at third hand, on the battlefields of the Low Countries and up and down the Spanish Main, by mercenaries and privateers, most notably the ‘merry, careful’ Francis Drake. Drake’s raid on the port of Cadiz in April 1587 had cost Spain some thirty ships and had bought England a twelvemonth reprieve. But all this did was to postpone the inevitable until the fateful year 1588, because the Spanish were coming, with the mightiest fleet that had ever been amassed. Tall-sided galleons like floating castles, many-oared galleys, cargo-carrying urcas, nimble pataches and zabras, all these had been assembling in the west-coast ports of the Iberian peninsula since 1586. Together they could hold some thirty thousand men, numerous cavalry horses and pack animals and all the many carefully counted barrels of food and water needed to sustain a force of such size. The normally tight-fisted Pope Sixtus—‘When it comes to getting money out of him, it is like squeezing his life blood,’ wrote the Spanish ambassador Olivares to King Philip—had swallowed his respect for the English Queen, Elizabeth I, and signed a treaty with Spain, promising a million gold ducats (about £250,000) to Philip should he manage to conquer England, so long as the next English ruler, a position on which Philip had designs himself, returned the country to Catholicism.* (#ulink_865bf50d-7d84-5ba6-b8f9-1cca8487a817) The Duke of Parma, commander-in-chief of the Spanish Netherlands, was only waiting for the signal to embark his army in a flotilla of flat-bottomed landing-craft, cross the English Channel and sail his forces up the Thames estuary. And all across Europe, rulers and ruled alike stopped what they were doing to watch and wait for the outcome to this clash between the forces of good and evil. This was ideological warfare of a type never before fought in Europe, transcending national boundaries and old-fashioned disputes about landownership. And while the opposing ideologies were, inevitably, somewhat tarnished by political and personal self-interest, nonetheless, in its purest distillation, this war was billed as the deciding round in the conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism, the final answer to a question that had paralysed sixteenth-century Christian Europe, the question of what you could and could not believe. Though few could afford to be combatants, no one could afford to be neutral. But the result, it seemed, was a foregone conclusion.
Ranged against England were the combined forces of Spain, Portugal, the Italian States, and the Spanish Netherlands, with France, though as yet undecided, also likely to join the Catholic crusade. The English troops, in comparison with Spain’s professional, battle-hardened soldiers, were an ill-trained rabble of amateur militiamen, drafted into service at county-wide musters and required to pay for their own gunpowder for the duration of combat. The officers were no better. Most refused to take orders from anyone lower in social standing than themselves. Had it not been for the remodelling of the Queen’s Navy by Drake’s fellow sea-dog, John Hawkins, the outcome of the Armada conflict might well have been very different. Still, Hawkins’s core fleet of twenty-three warships and eighteen smaller pinnaces was heavily outnumbered by the sixty-five galleons that formed the heart of the Spanish Navy. And his belief that the success of Elizabeth’s ships lay in long-range gunnery rather than traditional short-range grappling was not helped by those English gunmakers still busily selling cannons to the Spanish as late as 1587.
So at the beginning of 1588 the odds on the Deity being a Spaniard were temptingly short. ‘Pray to God’, wrote one member of the Armada force, ‘that in England he doth give me a house of some very rich merchant, where I may place my ensign.’ Indeed, for all those about to embark with the Armada, England was a place of lucrative spoils and members of the fleet were delighted by how easy it was to obtain credit on the eve of sailing. Many spent their money on fine clothes for the occasion and one returning Englishman reported that ‘the soldiers and gentlemen that come on this voyage are very richly appointed’. If the hard-headed bankers of Europe were putting their money on an easy victory for Spain, it was small wonder that in December 1587 a false rumour that the Spanish were coming sent the population of England’s coastal towns flying inland for protection.
As May 1588 gave way to a blustery June, a cargo ship under Captain Hans Limburger made its way slowly north from Cadiz, bound for the Hanseatic port of Hamburg. At Cape Espichel, just south of Lisbon, Limburger saw a sight that stunned him. Although Spain’s preparations were no secret to anyone in Europe, nothing had prepared the German captain for this. For one whole day Limburger’s ship beat slowly past the assembled Spanish fleet, ‘the ocean groaning under the weight of them’. At Plymouth Limburger was able to give the port authorities the confirmation they needed: the Armada was under sail and on its way.
Now, after many months of uncertainty, the orders were finally given for all army officers to remain on call and for all troops to be ready to move at an hour’s notice. The better-trained soldiers were positioned near the most likely landing sites, to attack the invasion force while it was disembarking and at its most vulnerable. Barriers of logs and chains were brought in to seal off main roads and all routes into towns and cities. Militia groups were instructed in the scorched-earth policy they were to employ should the Spanish once get a foothold on land. Strategic points such as bridges and fording places were put under guard and instructions were given that in the coastal towns and villages no one was allowed to leave once the warning beacons had been lit, under pain of death. Then the nation waited.
For now the bad weather Emperor Rudolf had seen written in the night skies and that had blown and sobbed its way through Europe for the better part of the year began to play its part in the conflict, breathing new life into the spectres of Regiomontanus’ prophecy. By the end of June the Spanish fleet was still holed up in the port of Corunna as storms swept the Iberian coastline. A month later it was the English Navy’s turn to suffer the high winds and heavy seas as it carried out its daily patrol of the western reaches of the English Channel. ‘I know not what weather you have had there,’ wrote Admiral Lord Howard of Effingham, commander of the fleet, to Sir Francis Walsingham, Principal Secretary of State, at court, ‘but there never was any such summer seen here on the sea.’ With the waiting came the whispering. ‘There has been a rumour at Court, which has spread all over London,’ reported Philip II’s eyes and ears in the English capital, ‘that the Spaniards have orders from their King to slaughter all English people, men and women, over the age of seven years.’
Finally on Friday, 29 July the Armada was sighted off the Cornish coastline, and for Howard, Hawkins, and Drake, and the men of the English Navy, battle commenced. Throughout the following week, between contrary winds and dead calms, the smaller, more mobile English vessels harried their larger, cumbersome Spanish counterparts the length of the Channel, trying at every turn to disrupt the tightly packed crescent formation adopted by the Armada fleet. Shrouded in a heavy pall of gunsmoke it was hard enough for those in the thick of each encounter to know what was going on about them, but for those onshore and far inland the desperate clawing into wind to gain the advantage, the agonizing and hypnotic slowness of the combatants closing on each other, the silence broken by the roar of gunfire, was all a distant, disconnected dream. In mainland Europe rumour had the Armada safely landed in a defeated, humbled England, with a captive Queen Elizabeth on her way to Rome, to appear, barefoot and penitent, before Pope Sixtus. In England they kept on waiting.
On Saturday, 6 August at 5 p.m. the Spanish fleet dropped anchor off Calais to make contact with the Duke of Parma. About midnight on the following day the tide turned, bringing with it, blazing out of the darkness, English fireships, packed with explosives, and in panic the Spaniards cut their cables and fled. The last chapter in the Armada’s story had begun. ‘From this piece of industry,’ wrote one Spanish officer, ‘they dislodged us with eight vessels, an exploit which with [our] one hundred and thirty they had not been able to do nor dared to attempt.’ What the fireships started, the storm-force winds now continued, sweeping the scattered Spanish fleet first towards the shoals of the Zeeland banks and then helplessly northwards up the English coast. For another Spanish officer this had become ‘the most fearful day in the world’. The Duke of Medina Sidonia, the Armada’s ill-fated and much maligned commander, now placed himself squarely in the hands of ‘God and His Blessed Mother to bring him to a port of safety’.* (#ulink_4b10436b-a463-5827-be2c-fabb8c5f0724)
The report of the Armada’s inadvertent flight north reached Queen Elizabeth as she was addressing her troops at Tilbury camp on 18 August, more than a week after the event. But even this good news did not come rumour-free, for now the Duke of Parma and his army were said to be on their way across the Channel. It was not until the end of August that the Dean of St Paul’s was ordered to announce officially that the Armada had been defeated and Philip II’s agent in London was able to write home to Spain on 7 September that ‘the Lords of the Council went to St Paul’s to give thanks to God for having rescued the realm from its recent danger’. Just three days later, though, another alarm was spread that the Armada was on its way back. By the beginning of November, after ten weeks of continued uncertainty, the public’s nerves were frayed to unravelling point. Parliament, which was to have met on 12 November, was prorogued until February ‘as it was seen that both people and nobles were weary of so much trouble’, wrote Marco Antonio Micea, a Genoese resident in London. ‘We are in such alarm and terror here that there is no sign of rejoicing amongst the Councillors at the victories they have gained. They look rather like men who have a heavy burden to bear.’ Even Elizabeth, who was not normally chary when it came to her own personal safety, was persuaded by her Council to stay away from St Paul’s ‘for fear that a harquebuss might be fired at her’. Micea noted that the fifty-five-year-old Queen looked ‘much aged and spent’. Perhaps the Spanish fleet had made for Scotland and had succeeded in persuading King James VI to avenge his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots’ execution of the year before; or perhaps they had rounded Scotland and were now in Ireland, stirring up trouble among the rebels there. In response to this new fear the Queen ‘sent Sir Thomas Perrot to raise 2,000 men in Wales, and take them over [to Ireland] with all speed’. The extent of Elizabeth’s anxiety may be measured by her willingness to throw yet more money at the conflict.
But if in England no one could quite believe they had won, on the Continent no one could believe that the Spanish had lost. The French ambassador in London had spent his summer merrily reporting stories of heavy English casualties, so when the English ambassador in Paris, Sir Edward Stafford, produced 400 pamphlets giving the English version of events, he was met with frank incredulity. ‘The English ambassador here had some fancy news printed stating that the English had been victorious,’ wrote Don Bernadino Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador in Paris, ‘but the people would not allow it to be sold, as they say it is all lies. One of the ambassador’s secretaries began to read in the palace a [report] which he said had been sent from England, but the people were so enraged that he was obliged to fly for his life.’ Only Pope Sixtus remained unimpressed by the European rumour-mill, refusing to loosen his grip on the million gold ducats he had promised Spain until he had better proof of Spanish success.
On 24 November England at last felt confident enough to celebrate its victory and ‘a solemn procession…was held to give thanks to God for the scattering of the Spanish fleet’. Through winter streets hung with blue cloth, Elizabeth ‘was carried in a gilded chair…drawn by two grey horses royally caparisoned…to the great cathedral of St Paul’s’, from the battlements of which eleven captured Armada banners streamed out above the city. Here, Elizabeth read out a prayer she had composed specially for the occasion. The mood was one of relief, but also, more pertinently, of sober thanksgiving. In the words of the medal struck to celebrate England’s victory: ‘God blew and they were scattered’. The victory was His.
And in giving this victory to God, Elizabeth extended a process begun by her father, Henry VIII, many years before: the process of nationalizing England’s state religion.* (#ulink_908b91d9-2851-5926-80be-acba709123ec) It was an inadvertent process, born out of fear: Henry’s fear of plunging his country back into yet another round of civil war if he failed to produce a male heir. And it was a process concluded in fear: the fear of standing alone and vulnerable against the richest and most powerful nation in Europe. The God who won the Armada could not be a Protestant God, at least not in the way Protestantism was understood throughout the rest of Europe. That God had demonstrably failed to help the Calvinists in the Low Countries; to protect the Huguenots of France from the St Bartholomew massacre of 1572; to save William of Orange from assassination in 1584. Neither could He be a Catholic. Not when the Armada carried at its head a consecrated standard bearing the rallying cry ‘Arise, oh Lord, and avenge thy cause’. Not when each ship had been provided with its own priest and each member of the expedition had received absolution in advance for the blood he would shed.* (#ulink_c320b6c1-667c-5f0b-8717-ac6867e841ef) Therefore, He could only be an Anglican God, that compromise and most English of Gods, who continued to frustrate both Catholics and Protestants in almost equal measure.† (#ulink_5687e161-0834-5a5b-a5ca-624722b2952e) So the subtle propaganda ran. In a Europe ravaged by wars of religion, only the English had chosen correctly.
And how lucky it was that God should be an Anglican, an Englishman, for no one believed for a moment that England’s conflict with Catholic Spain was over. Indeed, at the beginning of November the Venetian ambassador to Spain reported home to the Doge that ‘In spite of everything, His Majesty shows himself determined to carry on the war.’ So though the coach that bore Elizabeth to St Paul’s Cathedral ‘was open in front and on both sides’ so that she might better be seen by crowds of cheering Londoners, yet her Government was taking no risks. An order had been given ‘that in every household along the route no one should be allowed to look out from the windows while she was passing, unless the householder was prepared to stake his life and entire fortune on his trustworthiness.’ This was an England gripped in the jaws of fear and suspicion.
On Friday, 28 October 1588 a sailing ship beat its way slowly up the Norfolk coast. On board, its passengers scanned the shoreline for a suitable landing place. Having spotted what looked like a safe point between Happisburgh and Bacton, some miles to the south of Cromer, they ordered the crew to drop anchor until nightfall. As darkness fell the ship’s boat was launched and headed into shore. When it returned to the ship, it left standing on the beach two young Englishmen of whom the English Government had every reason to feel fearful and suspicious. The pair were Catholic priests belonging to the Society of Jesus, and their intention was to succeed where the Spanish Armada had failed: to return England to the Catholic Church. If the Armada was the latest in a progression of Franco-Spanish ‘Enterprises’ sanctioned by the Pope and designed to restore English Catholicism through force of arms, then these two young men represented Rome’s second line of spiritual attack: force of argument.* (#ulink_af63644f-9a32-5912-872a-0632745a7c32)
Argument had always been the Christian Church’s best weapon against heresy, chiefly because most heretical behaviour was thought to be a consequence of ignorance, poor judgement, or an imperfect understanding of the teachings of Christ.† (#ulink_36d705c0-1902-5b6d-a20b-08ca38961414) Such heretics were not sinful therefore, merely misguided, and required little more than clear reasoning to make them see the error of their ways. Of course there were other heretics who wilfully rejected Christ’s doctrines—out of pride, or a lust for power perhaps. They were sinners and merited the full weight of the Church’s wrath, which, ever since the eleventh century, had usually meant burning at the stake. There was a further subset of heresy still: schism, the rejection of papal supremacy. For the rebellious schismatic (who might uphold all Christ’s other teachings but this one) as for the misguided heretic, argument was deemed the best form of correction. So while Rome supported the invasion of England and the deposition of Elizabeth—her wilful heresy had imperilled the souls of her countrymen and God would forgive the use of force against her—it also dispatched its army of arguers. It was belief in the divine purpose of their argument that filled the two Englishmen now standing in the dark of a Norfolk beach, straining to hear above the noise of the waves on the shingle any sound to suggest their landing had been observed.* (#ulink_6758b6fb-0d7b-5bfb-b243-6d46d860f6eb)
Neither man had been long enough in Rome to forget the seeping chill of late October English rain. The bad weather that had so hampered the Armada had not abated and the year was ending with as cold a spell as it had begun. But the rain and the cold were the least of the two men’s worries as they now tried to put as much distance between them and the coast before dawn. In the dark it was impossible to pick a path that did not lead them up to a house instead of out into open fields. Twice, three times, a dog barked as they neared one of the fishermen’s cottages flanking the beach and hastily they retraced their steps. Finally, they headed into a nearby wood to take cover until first light. There, in whispers, they decided it would be safer to separate and each make his own way to London; that way, if one of them should be caught, the other still had a chance of reaching the capital undetected. As soon as it was light enough to see, the older of the two men, twenty-seven-year-old Edward Oldcorne, son of a Yorkshire bricklayer, made his way northwards out of the wood towards the town of Mundesley. On the road he fell in with a party of sailors, demobbed and returning home after the defeat of the Armada, and in their company and with the cover they unwittingly afforded him, he made his way to London.
Meanwhile, his companion was leaving the wood by a different path. John Gerard was twenty-four. He was born on 4 October 1564, the son of the prominent Lancashire landowner Sir Thomas Gerard, a former county sheriff.* (#ulink_a6eb2867-84fb-5f99-9faa-1c4d1d8bfd88) At the age of five John Gerard was removed from his parents’ care when it was discovered his father was involved in a scheme to rescue the newly imprisoned Mary, Queen of Scots from Tutbury Castle in Staffordshire and restore her to the Scottish throne. Sir Thomas Gerard was arrested and held in the Tower of London until 1573. On his release he collected his eight-year-old son from the family of strangers on whom he had been forcibly billeted and returned with him to Lancashire, to Bryn Hall, the Gerards’ estate. Whatever the effect on John Gerard of being ripped from his home at so young an age, these events did little to persuade him to conform to the State Church. At the age of just twelve he was sent down from Exeter College, Oxford for refusing to attend a Protestant Easter service.
In the summer of 1577 Gerard applied for, and received, a licence to travel abroad to study. For the next three years he attended lectures at Dr William Allen’s English College, first at the University of Douai in the Spanish Netherlands, then, when the college was expelled from there, at the University of Reims. Allen, an exiled Oxford academic, had opened the English College as a training school for those English boys still wishing to enter the Catholic priesthood, now that this was forbidden to them in their own country. The college also offered a thorough education to any English student unwilling to swear allegiance to the new Church of England, an oath required of all those graduating from the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. At Reims Gerard first came into contact with a member of the Society of Jesus, an English Jesuit named Lovel, and from Reims he travelled to Cleremont, the school of the French Jesuits near Paris, determined to join the Society himself. He was not yet sixteen.
The Society of Jesus was a new religious order, founded in 1540 by a Spanish ex-soldier called Ignatius Loyola, with the specific aim of converting the heathen and reconciling the lapsed. Loyola dreamed of countering the rise of Protestantism and restoring the Catholic Church to its former pre-eminence in Europe. To this end he had brought all his army training to bear on the problem in hand: ‘I have never left the army,’ he explained, ‘I have only been seconded to the service of God.’ His Jesuits operated as a tightly knit organization bound by a rigid, even military discipline, and Gerard, who used his time at the college to continue his studies, was quickly impressed by the elite band of priests who taught him. When illness forced him to return to England in the spring of 1583, he spent his convalescence disposing of his property and possessions in preparation for a new life among them.
His difficulty came in leaving the country for a second time. To leave England without State permission was a crime according to English law. To leave England to train as a Catholic priest was still worse a crime, the effects of which were often felt by the criminal’s family in his absence. Gerard chose to leave the country without a licence. With a party of other Catholics, all heading abroad with intentions similar to his own, he set sail from Gravesend early in November 1583. The weather was against them. After five days at sea, making heavy progress into strong winds, they were forced to put in to Dover. At Dover it was revealed they had a spy in their company when the entire party was arrested by customs officers and sent up to London for questioning. The spy, Thomas Dodwell, reported back to the Privy Council how the group had bribed ‘Raindall, the [officer] of Gravesend, [who] receiveth money of passengers, suffering them to pass without searching.’
While his companions were imprisoned, the nineteen-year-old Gerard (whose cousin Sir Gilbert Gerard was Master of the Rolls and held some sway with the Government) was taken into custody first by his uncle, George Hastings, brother to the Earl of Huntingdon, then by the Bishop of London. Both men set about encouraging Gerard to convert to the Protestant faith. Both men failed. It was a measure of his strength of will that the teenager held out against the arguments of his two more powerful opponents, with the threat of imprisonment, and worse, hanging over his head. But whatever fear Gerard might have felt, he left the Bishop of London’s palace for prison still protesting his Catholicism.
John Gerard was committed to the Marshalsea prison in Southwark on 5 March 1584. His year-long imprisonment was spent in the heady company of like-minded rebels against the nationalized Church: laymen and women arrested for their refusal to attend Protestant services and a number of priests awaiting execution. It was an intoxicating education. When at last his friends were able to secure his release from prison, in return for paid guarantees that he would not leave the country, his desire to become a Jesuit burnt fiercer than ever. At the end of May 1586 his chance came. An old friend of his, Anthony Babington, agreed to stand bail for him if he failed to appear before the authorities at the next quarter and John Gerard escaped to France. He was twenty-one.
From France, Gerard travelled south to Italy, where he entered the English College of Rome, the companion school to Dr William Allen’s successful Reims institution. By now his general eagerness to become a priest had transformed itself into the specific ambition of becoming a priest on the English mission. Pope Sixtus V granted him dispensation to take his holy orders early, some months short of the statutory age. The Society of Jesus agreed to admit him into their ranks as a novice and let him finish his training as he worked. And at last, on 15 August 1588, John Gerard became a Jesuit priest in the company of Edward Oldcorne. He was ready to return home.
Throughout late August and all of September, as the Armada fleet underwent its grim circumnavigation of the British Isles and rumour ran unchecked through the courts of Europe, Gerard and Oldcorne travelled north towards England, accompanied by two other priests. ‘Passing through Switzerland,’ Gerard wrote, ‘we stayed a night at Basle and decided to see the old Catholic buildings of the town: the Lutherans usually leave them intact but the Calvinists destroy them.’ At Reims, he noted, ‘we passed incognito’: the seminary city was full of spies. In Paris a prisoner in one of the city gaols calling himself Jacques Colerdin learned of their arrival. On 1 October Colerdin was able to scribble a letter to Sir Francis Walsingham in London, telling him that ‘There be 8 Priests over from Rome, whereof John Gerard…will be in England within five days.’ Colerdin, who described himself to the Archbishop of Paris as ‘an English priest and Bachelor in Theology’ in a petition he wrote seeking his release, was a Government informer.* (#ulink_1b738b6c-ef35-5ed7-8c22-b1bd74afa768) His real name was Gilbert Gifford. He was, indeed, a Catholic priest, but since his arrest as an alleged accomplice in the Babington Plot he had found it prudent to switch sides in the religious conflict.† (#ulink_bf616b46-ee7a-5cda-8e66-cae36d68ff56) Now he was well placed to point out his fellow seminarians to the English authorities.
From Paris, Gerard and Oldcorne continued on to Eu, some miles north of Dieppe, in preparation for crossing the Channel. But here they received unwelcome news from England. ‘The Spanish Fleet’, wrote Gerard, ‘had exasperated the people against the Catholics; everywhere a hunt was being organised for Catholics and their houses searched; in every village and along all the roads and lanes very close watches were kept to catch them.’ Clearly conditions at home were far from ideal for them to attempt a landing in secret and for the next few weeks the pair were forced to kick their heels on the French coast, while their superiors back in Rome decided what should be done. At last a letter came through: ‘we were free’, wrote Gerard, ‘either to go ahead with the enterprise or stay back until things in England had quietened down. This was the answer we desired.’ Immediately, the two men set about finding a ship.
As John Gerard stood in the shadows of a Norfolk wood choosing the best and safest route to London, he had already committed treason, according to England’s latest laws. The act of 1585 ‘against Jesuits, seminary priests and such other like disobedient persons’, one of nine pieces of parliamentary legislation during Elizabeth’s reign to seek to redefine treachery in the face of a newly perceived menace, employed bully-boy language to make its point. Any Englishman ordained a Catholic priest since June 1559 would, the act threatened, soon find out ‘how dangerous it shall be for them…once to put their foot on land within any of her Majesty’s dominions’. In returning home, in stepping from his ship’s boat onto a Norfolk beach, John Gerard had become a traitor to his country. If caught, he would be punished accordingly. As he left the wood, heading westwards, he was spotted by a group of men walking towards him.* (#ulink_a292c057-a0e5-5a0f-9755-4c8d78d6bae5)
Gerard takes up the story:
‘Walking boldly up to them I asked whether they knew anything about a stray hawk; perhaps they had heard its bell tinkling as it was flying around. I wanted them to believe that I had lost my bird and was wandering about the countryside in search of it [then] they would not be surprised because I was a stranger here and unfamiliar with the lanes and countryside; they would merely think that I had wandered here in my search…They told me they had not seen or heard a falcon recently and they seemed sorry that they could not put me on its track. So with a disappointed look I went off as if I were going to search for it in the trees and hedges round about.’
This was his strategy for the rest of that day. Each time he saw someone working in the fields he approached them, asking them the same question: had they seen his hawk? His progress was slow. Occasionally he doubled back on his tracks to make his search more convincing. But gradually he moved inland, away from the sea.
‘At the end of the day I was soaked with rain and felt hungry. It had been a rough crossing and I had been able to take practically no food or sleep on board, so I turned for the night into an inn in a village I was passing, thinking that they were less likely to question a man they saw entering an inn.’ Inside, he made enquiries about buying a pony and found the people willing to help him. The following morning, Sunday, 30 October, he set off on horseback towards Norwich, no longer in any danger of being taken for a vagrant, but still at the mercy of the county watches. At the village of Worstead he was apprehended.
‘They ordered me to dismount, and asked me who I was and where I came from. I told them I was in the service of a certain lord who lived in another county—he did in fact know me well, although these men had not heard of him—and I explained that my falcon had flown away and I had come here to see whether I could recover it.’ But this time the watchers refused to release him, insisting he be brought before the constable and the officer of the watch for further questioning. Gerard submitted and was led to the village church where the two men were attending morning service. Now he was faced with a dilemma. ‘One of the watchers went in [to the church] and came back with the answer that [the officer] wanted me to come inside where he would see me at the end of the service.’ For Gerard it was a sin to enter a Protestant church. So Gerard refused to go in, claiming he was reluctant to leave his horse behind. When the officer at last came out to question him he was clearly angry and suspicious. ‘He asked me first where I came from and I named a number of places which I had learned were not far away. Then he asked me my name, employment, home, the reason for my coming, and I gave him the answers that I had given before. Finally on asking whether I was carrying any letters, I invited him to search me.’ The officer was unimpressed. He declared ‘it was his duty to take me before the Justice of the Peace’, and Gerard prepared himself for immediate arrest. Then suddenly the man relented, with the words, ‘You’ve got the look of an honest fellow. Go on then in God’s name.’ Later, Gerard attributed this stroke of good fortune to providence. Now, he hurriedly set off towards Norwich before the officer could change his mind.
Furnished by a fellow traveller with the name of a suitable inn on the southernmost outskirts of Norwich, Gerard circled the city walls. He avoided the busy London road, which led into the city through the well-guarded St Stephen’s Gates, and passed instead over common grazing land to Brazen Doors, a smaller set of gates that opened onto All Saints Green. From there it was a short walk to the inn on Market Hill, at the foot of Norwich Castle.
The inn was busy and Gerard settled himself down to observe. ‘I was there only a short time when in walked a man who seemed well known to the people of the house. He greeted me courteously and then sat down by the fire to warm himself. He began talking about some Catholic gentlemen imprisoned in the city and mentioned by name a man, one of whose relatives had been with me in the Marshalsea Prison…I listened carefully but said nothing.’ When the man left the room, Gerard asked his neighbour who he was. The reply was welcome news to him: ‘He is a very good fellow, except for the fact that he is a Papist.’ The man was out on bail from the city gaol after a decade in prison for his faith and he was, by common consent, ‘a most pig-headed’ Catholic.* (#ulink_07fc9034-06c5-569b-a565-26b6f0f944ce)
‘I kept quiet until the man returned and when the others had gone out I told him that I wanted to have a word with him in some safe place. I had heard he was a Catholic, I said, and was very pleased to hear it because I was one too.’ Briefly, Gerard explained how he came to be in Norwich and asked for the man’s assistance in getting to London. The man knew of no one travelling to the capital that Gerard could join, and so pass as one of their party, but he did know someone in town who might be able to help him and he left the inn to find this contact.
When he returned to the inn a short while later he asked Gerard to follow him out onto the street and into the thick of the bustling market. While the two men pretended to examine the various goods for sale they were observed from a distance by a third man. Soon he approached the pair and asked them both to come with him. He led the way through the narrow side streets of Norwich towards the city’s cathedral. There, in the cavernous nave of the great church, the man questioned Gerard intently before asking him outright whether he was a priest—in which case, said the man, he would offer him all the help he needed.* (#ulink_230e26b5-01b0-5ff7-814a-bd03208baa10) Gerard asked his name. Then he admitted he was a Jesuit priest sent from Rome.
The printers of Amsterdam, as they compiled their annual almanac for 1588, had predicted that late autumn would be lucky for some. So it had proved for John Gerard. The man in whose hands he had just placed his life was Edward Yelverton, one of the richest Catholics in Norfolk. That same evening Yelverton spirited Gerard out of Norwich and by Monday, 31 October the priest had gone to ground at Yelverton’s house at Grimston, 6
/
miles northeast of King’s Lynn. After forty-eight hours at large Gerard had reached a safe haven. His work, though, had only just begun. And with the events of the summer that work had become harder still.
The Spanish Armada had achieved what no amount of religious reforms and parliamentary legislation over the preceding decades had been able to do. It had united a fractured nation behind its unhappy compromise of a nationalized Church in opposition to the Catholic crusade. It had bound Anglicanism and Englishness together seemingly indissolubly. And it had transformed all those who could not bring themselves to accept this new Church of England into potential traitors, fifth columnists willing, in the rhetoric of a royal proclamation issued that July, ‘to betray their own natural country and most unnaturally to join with foreign enemies in the spoil and destruction of the same’. To be a Catholic in the year 1588 was to be an unnatural Englishman. It was to be worse than that still, as a story told by a fellow Jesuit illustrated. In late August, as many Catholics awaited execution for their alleged treachery, a ‘certain lady went to a man of importance asking him to use his influence that the death of one of the condemned might be delayed. The first question was whether the person whose cause she pleaded was guilty of murder. She replied that he had not been condemned for any such thing, but only for the Catholic religion. “Oh dear,” said the gentleman, “For his religion! If he had committed murder I should not have hesitated to comply with your request; but as it is a question of religion, I dare not interfere.”’ To the English in Armada year, even homicide was less of an evil than Catholicism.
And Gerard had come to join a covert mission, the first undertaking of which was to ask English Catholics to stand up and be counted, to demonstrate their faith by refusing to attend the Protestant Church, to identify themselves to a Government seeking to eradicate them as traitors. Small wonder then that in an England still reeling from the events of that year, in an England crying out for revenge, this task had acquired Herculean proportions.* (#ulink_5936537b-084a-5b9d-914d-57357b49a120)
Fourteen years earlier, though, for the first young English priests to embark upon this newly begun mission, their venture must have seemed no less a trial of strength. They might have been returning home to their family and friends, but at the same time they were entering an unfamiliar, hostile world: a beleaguered and suspicious England whose savagery had yet to be put to the test. And they were entering that world in secret, in disguise, in the very manner of the political secret agents their homeland believed them to be. Formidable, too, had been the challenge of establishing the mission at the start, of drawing together the dejected exiles from an Oxford University shattered by religious reforms, of schooling them in martyrdom and of dispatching them home in increasing numbers to face unknown perils.
For his ninth task Hercules had only to steal the Amazon Queen’s belt—a gift she herself had been willing to grant him. John Gerard and his fellows were attempting to steal the souls of English men and women back to the Catholic Church, and to do so under the nose of the, perhaps, even more redoubtable English Queen. It was a labour that would come at a high price.
* (#ulink_ee421f01-9f92-52ac-bace-1d1b6cf1fd22) Regiomontanus’s real name was Johan Muller, from Königsberg, now Kaliningrad, in Lithuania. He supplied Christopher Columbus with astronomical tables on his voyage across the Atlantic.
* (#ulink_4b8931e4-4190-5b7e-8382-934064b0426d) At the beginning of 1588 Dr John Harvey was commissioned by the Privy Council to write an academic pamphlet denouncing the accuracy of prophecies in general and Regiomontanus’s in particular.
* (#ulink_fa28b6e2-0a34-5332-a9dd-106313d1ddf6) Sixtus had said of Elizabeth ‘were she only a Catholic, she would be without her match, and we would esteem her highly’.
* (#ulink_e8a1029e-b5fe-5124-be38-caf7a65dc30e) His flagship, the San Martin, reached the Spanish port of Santander on 21 September, with 180 of her crew dead from disease and starvation, another forty killed in battle and the rest so weak the ship had to be towed into dock. Only some seventy ships of the fleet returned.
* (#ulink_a8fee17c-5927-5f5f-9e22-0fb3f2bbb3a2) In the context of this book the term ‘nationalism’ is not intended to convey any pre-occupation with English ethnic identity; rather, it is intended to convey the growing sense of English sovereignty at this period, in response to the fragmentation of Christendom and England’s loss of its European territories.
* (#ulink_a8fee17c-5927-5f5f-9e22-0fb3f2bbb3a2) The Duke of Medina Sidonia’s sailing orders to his fleet confirmed that ‘the principal foundation and cause, that have moved the King his Majesty to make and continue this journey, hath been, and is, to serve God; and to return unto his church a great many of contrite souls, that are oppressed by the heretics, enemies to our holy catholic faith’.
† (#ulink_a8fee17c-5927-5f5f-9e22-0fb3f2bbb3a2) The terms Catholic, Protestant and Anglican should be applied with a certain linguistic caution. Broadly, the word ‘Catholic’ was by now recognized to refer only to those followers of the Roman Church. The word ‘Protestant’ referred initially only to German church reformers, though by the late sixteenth century it had acquired a wider reference and was in use in England to describe followers of the State Church. English Protestantism, though, was a very different animal from its European counterparts. The word ‘Anglican’ seems first to have been used as a derogatory term by King James VI of Scotland in 1598. It was not until much later that it became synonymous with the Church of England and English Protestantism.
* (#ulink_1ffc140a-b860-5f53-aa42-145faaee2b20) In 1585 Philip II had offered himself to Pope Sixtus V as the sword of the Catholic Church in the fight to reconcile England with Rome. Previously, French Catholics, led by the powerful Guise family, had planned a series of invasions, with the intention of deposing Elizabeth and replacing her with the half-French Mary, Queen of Scots (Mary’s mother was Mary of Guise). Mary was Elizabeth’s de facto heir apparent, although Elizabeth never acknowledged her as such.
† (#ulink_453f77ff-f6a2-5f42-8448-d36e00c7a414) Heretics, as defined by St Thomas (II-II: 11: 1) were those who, having professed the faith of Christ, then proceeded to corrupt it from within. They differed from Infidels who refused to believe in Christ at all, and from Apostates who renounced Christianity for another faith, or no faith altogether. The word heresy derives from the Greek word for choice.
* (#ulink_453f77ff-f6a2-5f42-8448-d36e00c7a414) Every detail of this landing is taken from an account of it written up afterwards by one of the two Jesuits, Father John Gerard.
* (#ulink_1a0e42e7-3b21-5a53-a488-553fbc927341) The sheriff was the Crown’s chief executive officer in a county, in charge of keeping the peace, dispensing justice, and overseeing local elections.
* (#ulink_15d1f792-08cf-5d28-8415-4354d04d4abd) He was arrested in a Paris brothel in 1587, though the precise nature of his crime remains unclear. He died in prison in 1590.
† (#ulink_15d1f792-08cf-5d28-8415-4354d04d4abd) The 1586 Babington Plot was the last in a series of Catholic attempts to assassinate Elizabeth and free Mary, Queen of Scots in advance of a foreign invasion; it led to Mary’s execution. Anthony Babington, Gerard’s friend, appears to have been a man of more devotion than sense and how much the plot was the work of agents provocateurs remains ambiguous. Gilbert Gifford’s role is particularly questionable and most believe he was working for Walsingham from the start. Gerard’s father was also arrested for alleged complicity in the plot. He was released in October 1588.
* (#ulink_ba32c155-a30c-5c0b-a62a-b98d3694e13d) The coastal counties had borne the brunt of the nation’s anxiety during the Armada conflict. Close watches had been kept throughout the summer months for spies, Spanish ships, and anything suspicious; now those same coastal watches were kept busy patrolling the countryside looking for vagabonds. The vagabonds in question were disbanded sailors and militiamen, laid off without their promised pay and in search of food and work. Since the Armada, an order had been issued that any vagabond ‘found with any manifest offence tending to stir troubles or rebellion…[was]…to be executed by martial law’.
* (#ulink_4f6f6784-5ec9-54c2-ada1-c1e2490246e9) The ‘pig-headed’ Catholic gentleman was almost certainly the Norfolk landowner Robert Downes, whose Melton estate lay just a mile west of Norwich. He was arrested in 1578 for his refusal to attend the Protestant Church. He lost his estates in Suffolk and Essex and in 1602 he surrendered most of his life interest in Melton to the Queen. He was still in Norwich gaol in 1598. He died in 1610.
* (#ulink_f721bc4a-cab1-5e80-beec-eb403aeb1315) Catholics believed that though they could not enter a Protestant church where divine services were held, the nave of a cathedral was part of the general precincts of the building and therefore not sacrosanct.
* (#ulink_748cd99b-a8fa-52d4-89dc-cec0f20feb45) One eyewitness wrote of the vengeance taken against English Catholics following the Armada’s defeat: ‘When the danger of the war at sea was over, and the army conscripted upon land dispersed, our rulers turned their weapons from the foe abroad and plunged them into the bowels of their own nation. The hatred stored up against the Spaniards they are wreaking with a sort of bestial fury upon their own fellow citizens and subjects.’
Two (#ulink_66206c88-db52-5d71-b29e-20586b09b544)
‘If God himself on earth abode would make
He Oxford sure would for his dwelling take.’
(Sixteenth century)
ON 10 DECEMBER 1566, eight years into the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and twenty years prior to John Gerard’s secret Norfolk landing, Magdalen College acquired a new tenant for its property at 3 Castle Street, standing in the shadow of Oxford Castle. The tenant’s name was Walter Owen. He was a twenty-six-year-old carpenter with a wife and young family. In time, all four sons from this family would join the mission to save English Catholicism. Two would die for it. One, in death, would hold in his hands the life of almost every Catholic involved in it. His name was Nicholas Owen.
Few facts are known about Nicholas Owen’s childhood: an approximate date of birth (some time between 1561 and 1564), a joinery apprenticeship (in February 1577) to Oxford’s William Conway, and the location of the Owen family’s house on Castle Street—little more. Across the road from this six-room, two-storey tenement stood the twelfth century parish church of St Peter-le-Bailey, a ‘very old little church and odd’. Four doors to the left of the house was 7 Castle Street, called Billing Hall or the Redcock. Here, in 1298, it was said a clerk had caused the Devil to appear. A few yards to the right of the house were the butchers’ shambles, a row of shops in the middle of the newly paved Great Bailey Street. Here, the blood and offal spilt from the freshly killed carcasses coursed over the gravel and into the drainage channel running down the centre of the road. Heaven, hell and the stench of blood: Nicholas Owen was raised within the axis of all three.
Further still to the left, high up on the hill, stood the tall tensided keep of Oxford Castle, its walls as thick as a man was tall. Within that keep there stood another, its walls only slightly less thick, and inside that there was the well chamber, with a well shaft so deep you could not fathom the bottom of it. Walls within walls, chambers within chambers: Oxford Castle would provide plenty of inspiration for Nicholas Owen in his later life. Beyond the keep there lay the castle gaol and next to the castle gaol there stood the gallows.
The castle was in a ruinous state by the time of Owen’s birth: the seat of Oxford’s civic power had long ago shifted to the city’s Council Chambers. But beyond the parish of St Peter-le-Bailey, to its west, lay evidence of a more recent power-shift still. Here were the remains of Oseney Abbey, lately Oxford’s cathedral. All that was left of it were the church walls, the dovecote and the outbuildings; the rest of the stone had been stripped from the site and carried over to the construction works at Christ Church College. Further to the south a similar process was at work as the Franciscan and Dominican friaries were dismantled piece by piece by city speculators and sold off to make new townhouses.
The landscape of England was being re-drawn. The castles and manor houses of the old feudal aristocracy had shared their domination of the English countryside with the spires and steeples of the abbeys, priories and monasteries. They had stamped their authority on the public consciousness by the sheer scale of their physical presence. But both aristocrats and abbots had found themselves systematically stripped of that authority in Tudor England. And all those who had bowed to the seigniority of Nobility and Church, who had prospered under it or were sheltered by it, were left shivering in the brisk winds of change.
This was the birth of modern England, with a newly re-worked relationship between Parliament and monarch, and an increasing dependence on the unstoppable middle classes. Of course for some it had been an entirely unwanted pregnancy, but for many, many more across the nation, some with, some without a vested interest in the old order, but all of them sharing a strong desire for stability and the certainty of tradition, it would prove a difficult birth: bloody and unutterably painful. And nowhere was this truer than at Oxford.
On 3 February 1530, just over thirty years before Nicholas Owen was born, William Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury, peremptorily thrust Oxford University into the centre of the controversy of the hour. He wrote to the Vice-Chancellor asking him and Oxford’s academics to provide a unanimous opinion on the validity of the marriage of Henry VIII to Catherine of Aragon.
The request was as untactful as it was unwelcome: Cardinal Wolsey, the university’s wealthiest patron, had been arrested only the year before for failing to provide Henry with the verdict he was looking for. And now it must have seemed to those at Oxford, asked to enter after Wolsey into this most explosive of minefields, that the Cardinal’s downfall would soon be followed by their own. So Oxford dragged its heels. When Cambridge, to the same request, came quickly back with the answer Henry wanted, the relief in the fens might have been palpable but the spotlight now shone ever more brightly on the midlands. And still Oxford dragged its heels.
In early April the King could wait no longer. His agents, led by the Bishop of Lincoln, descended on the university, hotly pursued by a strongly worded letter from Henry himself. While the bishop worked on Convocation, persuading them to hand the matter over to the university’s theologians, Henry reminded the ‘youth’ of Oxford precisely where their loyalties lay. This two-pronged attack produced the desired result. Though the Faculty of Arts grumbled that the Faculty of Theology had no right to speak for the university as a whole, the combination of manipulation and not so veiled threat had won the day. On 8 April Oxford University gave Henry the answer he was looking for: his marriage was invalid. But its tardiness in doing so was neither forgiven nor forgotten.* (#ulink_76cb328b-2e74-5ea2-abc5-cf1a9a017a67)
In September 1535 Henry’s agents were back in Oxford as part of a whirlwind tour of the country in preparation for the dissolution of the monasteries and by now the bloodshed had begun. In July of that year one of Oxford’s most illustrious former scholars, Sir Thomas More, was executed on Tower Hill, a victim of the new Treason Act: a piece of legislation that efficiently turned loyalty to the Pope in Rome into treachery to the English State. More’s scruples did not trouble Henry’s agents, though: Dr Richard Layton, ‘a cleric of salacious tastes’, and his assistant, John Tregwell, brought with them to Oxford an estate agent’s eye for a property and a prospector’s nose for gold, neatly masked behind an official mandate to root out opposition to the King’s new church. Their report, when it came, hit the university a sickening blow.
The first wave of the dissolution saw all of Oxford’s religious houses shut down: the Benedictine-run Canterbury, Durham and Gloucester Colleges, and the Cistercian-run St Bernard’s College. Their assets were stripped, their real estate sold off to the highest bidder and their inhabitants turned out onto the streets. Scores of academics and undergraduates now found themselves jobless, homeless and penniless. Hard hit too were the university libraries. College after college was ransacked for its illuminated books (seen as symbols of a despised papist idolatry), which were then carried out in cartloads and destroyed. In New College quadrangle the pages of the scattered medieval manuscripts blew thick as the autumn leaves, reported Layton. One enterprising student, a Master Greenefeld from Buckinghamshire, gathered them up and used them to make ‘Sewells or Blanshers [game-scarers] to keep the Deer within the wood, and thereby to have better cry with his hounds.’
Oxford reeled under this attack. The developing university had drawn the wealth of the monasteries to the city. Those same monasteries had spawned the abbeys and priories, and they, in turn, had financed the building of Oxford’s first academic halls. And so the university and the city had grown. Even the newer, secular colleges, which escaped the cull but were bludgeoned into a show of loyalty, were dependent on the Church revenue now being siphoned into the Crown’s coffers. The destruction of the monasteries brought academic chaos to Oxford. More pertinently, it also brought festering resentment.
Some fourteen years later, in 1549, royal agents called on Oxford again. This time they were Edward VI’s visitors, come to enforce his new Prayer Book, the first real doctrinal step towards Protestantism.* (#ulink_13d3c6f1-5ef8-5229-bd5f-0d5f027a79a3) Hot on their heels came the German and Swiss mercenary forces of Lord Grey of Wilton. Let Oxford be in no doubt that this regime meant business. Of the thirteen heads of those Oxford colleges still remaining, the visitors could find only two who supported the Government’s religious policy; as the Protestant reformer, Peter Martyr, remarked: ‘the Oxford men…are still pertinaciously sticking in the mud of popery’. But events soon proved that Oxford men were not the only stick-in-the-muds. July of that year burnt with the heat of a countrywide rebellion. On 12 July the Duke of Somerset wrote to Lord Russell, to lament the ‘stir here in Bucks. and Oxfordshire by instigation of sundry priests (keep it to yourself)’. Lord Russell scarcely had time to broadcast the news; just six days later Grey’s mercenaries had quickly and ruthlessly put out the fires. The eleven-year-old King Edward noted gleefully in his journal that Lord Grey ‘did so abash the rebels, that more than half of them ran their ways, and other [sic] that tarried were some slain, some taken and some hanged’. Grey left careful instruction that ‘after execution done the heads of every of them…to be set up in the highest place for the more terror of the said evil people’. The vicars of Chipping Norton and of Bloxham were hanged from the steeples of their own churches, and Johann Ulmer, a Swiss medical student at Christ Church College, wrote home to his patron, the Zurich reformer Heinrich Bullinger, that ‘the Oxfordshire papists are at last reduced to order, many of them having been apprehended, and some gibbeted, and their heads fastened to the walls’.
The purges soon followed. Magdalen College lost its president, Dr Owen Oglethorpe, forced out in favour of a suitable Protestant candidate. Christ Church lost John Clement, a former tutor in the household of Sir Thomas More, who now fled to the university at Louvain in the Spanish Netherlands to join the growing community of Oxford disaffected there. Corpus Christi lost its dean and its president, both arrested and carried off to London, one to the Marshalsea prison for seditious preaching, the other to the Fleet prison for using the old form of service on the preceding Corpus Christi day. These were not the only expulsions and Oxford braced itself for a stormy future.
And then the weather turned. On 6 July 1553 Edward died, and the chill winds of reform swung southerly, blowing before them, back from the Continent, the exiles of Oxford: Oglethorpe back to Magdalen, Clement back to practise medicine in Essex. They passed on the dockside a new generation of Oxford men, John Jewel of Corpus Christi, Christopher Goodman, the Lady Margaret Professor, off into exile in their turn, as Queen Mary immediately rescinded her brother’s statutes. The next five years brought calm to a city that basked in the warmth of the sovereign’s personal favour. They also brought prosperity. Mary tripled the university’s revenue and oversaw the foundation of two new colleges, Trinity and St John’s, in place of the ruined Durham and St Bernard’s.
At Corpus Christi the ornaments and vestments hidden from sight during Edward’s reign were triumphantly returned to the college chapel. Communion tables were quickly removed and replaced with new altars; the ‘6 psalms in English’, the ‘great Bible’ and the ‘book of Communion’—all of which had been demanded by Edward’s visitors—were destroyed; and, all around Oxford, people picked up the pieces of lives rudely shattered by statute from London. When ex-Bishops Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley, and the former Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer, were sent to Oxford for trial, it was signal proof that Mary never doubted the city’s loyalty. That the Government wished to demonstrate in an academic setting the shortcomings of doctrinal heresy and that all the accused were from Cambridge merely underlined the wisdom of the decision. When the three men were burnt in a ditch opposite Balliol College it had little impact on the watching crowd—Latimer’s ‘candle’ of martyrdom found a marked lack of oxygen in Oxford.
Mary was swept into power on a wave of popular support, but she found herself left high and dry on virgin sand as England’s first queen regnant since Matilda’s ill-fated attempt to assert her claim to her father, Henry I’s throne. Matilda had plunged the nation into a nineteen-year civil war; throughout the last bitter summer of Mary’s reign Englishmen can have felt only relief that they had got away so lightly this time around. Still, the previous five years had brought more than their fair share of misery. On her accession Mary had commanded her ‘loving Subjects, to live together in quiet Sort, and Christian Charity, leaving those new found devilish Terms of Papist or Heretic’. Her first Parliament had seemed to speak for the majority of her people. Then had come marriage to the reviled King Philip of Spain, the burning of Protestants and a disastrous war with France, and now those same people, the stench of the execution pyres fresh in their nostrils, awaited her death with impatience. On 17 November 1558 it finally came and ‘all the churches in London did ring and at night [the people] did make bonfires and set tables in the street and did eat and drink and make merry for the new Queen’, wrote Machyn in his diary. At just twenty-five years old, though, that new young queen, Elizabeth, was very much an unknown quantity. While London celebrated, Oxford held its breath and waited for what the royal visitors would bring.
On Christmas Day 1558, just weeks into the new reign, Dr Owen Oglethorpe of Magdalen, now Bishop of Carlisle and the officiating divine for the festivities, received a message from Queen Elizabeth asking him not to elevate the consecrated host at High Mass that day. The Spanish ambassador, Count de Feria, reported Oglethorpe’s refusal to comply with the request: ‘Her Majesty was mistress of his body and life, but not of his conscience’. Elizabeth heard mass that day until the gospel had been read and then, as Oglethorpe prepared to celebrate the transformation of bread to body and wine to blood, she rose and left the royal chapel. To those who watched and waited this was the first public indication of which way the Queen might jump.
If Elizabeth herself had wanted a sign of how the battle lines were forming she need not have looked far. Mary’s death had brought with it a flurry of bag packing in Geneva, Zurich, Strasbourg and Frankfurt, the centres of Protestantism, as the exiles from the previous reign prepared to return home. After all, Elizabeth, like her brother Edward, had been educated from childhood in the new religion. Meanwhile, the opposing camp was quick to make its objections felt. At Mary’s funeral the Bishop of Winchester praised the dead monarch as a good and loyal daughter of the true Church, referring to Elizabeth, throughout, as ‘the other sister’. He laid down his challenge to the new Queen, a challenge peculiar to her sex, in the bluntest of terms: ‘How can I, a woman, be head of the church, who, by Scripture, am forbidden to speak in church, except the church shall have a dumb head?’ At Elizabeth’s coronation the Archbishop of York refused to officiate and only Owen Oglethorpe could be persuaded to perform the ceremony. And in France King Henri II, who had ordered that the arms of England should be quartered with those of Scotland upon the marriage of Mary Stuart to the Dauphin, now encouraged his son and daughter-in-law to style themselves King and Queen of England.
Was Elizabeth’s choice of religion ever really in doubt then? She was the daughter of the ‘concubine Anne Boleyn’, the woman for whom Henry VIII had broken with Rome in the first place. Her parents’ marriage had never been recognized by the Catholic Church and her own legitimacy of birth had long been a subject for parliamentary enactment. Just days before her mother’s execution Thomas Cranmer had annulled her parents’ marriage and Elizabeth, at a stroke, was both bastardized and disinherited. Her present claim to the throne rested on her father’s will and the Succession Act of 1543, which reinstated her as Henry’s heir, and the French, in particular, were quick to cast doubts on Parliament’s right to tamper with these sacred laws of inheritance—by Christmas 1558 they ‘did not let to say and talk openly that Her Highness is not lawful Queen of England and that they have already sent to Rome to disprove her right’, wrote Lord Cobham, Elizabeth’s envoy in Paris.
The French had indeed sent to Rome. By the New Year Sir Edward Carne was reporting back from the Holy City that ‘the ambassador of the French laboreth the Pope to declare the Queen illegitimate and the Scottish Queen successor to Queen Mary’. That the French chose to object to Elizabeth’s claim out of political self-interest rather than religious scruple was not in question: they had raised similar doubts about the legitimacy of Elizabeth’s sister Mary when Henry VIII tried to engineer an overly advantageous marriage treaty between her and the Duc d’Orléans. But their challenge to her title underlined Elizabeth’s quandary. If she wished to retain papal supremacy in England she would need to throw herself on the mercy of the Pope. Paul IV had intimated that he was quite ready to consider her claim to her title, but could she really stomach the indignity of going cap in hand to Rome, begging to be excused her bastardy? And could she afford to begin her reign from a position of such weakness? Surely England’s throne was her birthright and no Pope could grant her dispensation to wear the crown? So ‘the wolves of Geneva’ packing to return home to England knew from the start that the odds on Elizabeth seeking a national religion, independent of Rome, were short enough for them to stake their lives on. Now they came back in readiness for that outcome.
They did not have long to wait. On 8 May 1559 Elizabeth dissolved the first Parliament of her reign, giving royal assent to those acts from which her new Church would take its shape: the Act of Supremacy, which settled on Elizabeth the title of Supreme Governor of that Church, and the Act of Uniformity, which agreed the doctrine it should follow.
The reactions followed swiftly. ‘A leaden mediocrity,’ wrote the newly returned Protestant, John Jewel. ‘The Papacy was never abolished…but rather transferred to the sovereign,’ wrote Theodore Béza in Geneva to Heinrich Bullinger in Zurich. From the first, Elizabeth’s was a Protestant settlement that failed to please the Protestants. But neither did it please the Catholics. ‘Religion here now is simply a question of policy’, wrote the Bishop of Aquila from London, ‘and in a hundred thousand ways they let us see that they neither love us nor fear us.’ John Jewel expressed his surprise that ‘the ranks of the papists have fallen almost of their own accord’, and Count de Feria wrote sadly home to Spain to explain why: ‘The Catholics are in a great majority in the country, and if the leading men in it were not of so small account things would have turned out differently.’* (#ulink_a04b00f7-fbb5-5ca6-bd18-39114159def7) And in London a zealous mob went on the rampage, stripping the capital’s churches of their statues and stained-glass windows ‘as if it had been the sacking of some hostile city’.
From the start Elizabeth’s religious settlement was a compromise. Like all compromises it failed to satisfy anyone and like all compromises it would be subjected to stresses and strains as each dissatisfied party tried, in turn, to wrest back the advantage. But it is the fact that there was need for a compromise that is of significance to this story, because it suggests a country divided into pressure groups of equal fighting weight.
The religious changes of the English Reformation, so decisive and so devastating for a select few in key positions of authority, had filtered slowly through the rest of the country, dependent upon the efficiency and willingness of those officers charged with their enforcement. By 1558 England’s religious spectrum was a kaleidoscope of colours ranging all the way from the most Roman of purples to Puritan grey. It is impossible to estimate the precise number of confirmed Catholics and Protestants, together with the number of relative indifferents, in England at Elizabeth’s succession. It is equally impossible to arrive at a precise and consistent definition for English Catholicism or English Protestantism at this time: these were not hermetic terms upon which everyone could agree and with which everyone could identify. Indeed it is unlikely that everyone could have told you what they were, Catholic or Protestant, if questioned. It is highly probable that in reaching a compromise settlement the Government paid close attention to the predictable response of the powerful and predatory Catholic nations of Europe. But it is certain that such a compromise would not have been necessary had England not been divided, top to bottom, on this matter of religion. The England Elizabeth inherited was definitely not a Protestant country.
For every Londoner in the largely pro-Protestant capital who went on a spree of vandalism, there was someone else in the shires and villages quietly secreting away the statues, crucifixes and church plate for happier times. For anyone in the south of England—and close to the seat of government—prepared to toe the party line if it led to promotion, there was someone else in the north of the country and far from influence, stubbornly doing as he pleased. For anyone whose heart belonged to Geneva and who felt they had been betrayed by the Queen, there was another whose heart belonged to Rome, who was smarting just as badly. And for Elizabeth, whose heart belonged firmly to England, the challenge lay in holding these two opposing forces in their precarious balance long enough to allow civil divisions to heal over and to effect the urgently needed overhaul of the country’s economy and the repair of its diplomatic relations with the rest of Europe. Because the twenty-five-year-old Queen can have been in little doubt that, as far as Europe was concerned, she and England were in for a turbulent future.
And for the ordinary man and woman in the street, the challenge lay in working out precisely what was required of them by this latest change to the national religion.
On the face of it these requirements were simple. The new Act of Uniformity demanded each subject’s presence at their parish church every Sunday and holy day. Failure to do so, without reasonable excuse, would result in a twelve pence fine for each offence, or the ‘censure of the church’ and possible excommunication, with the consequent loss of civil rights.
Going to church on a Sunday had long been a tradition inspired by faith but enforced by the ecclesiastical courts and over the centuries the machinery of that enforcement had become powerfully efficient: the long arm of the Church’s law reached the full length and breadth of England. It was this machinery, in place, fully operational and re-greased with parliamentary drive in place of holy oil, that Elizabeth’s ministers now used to unseat the religion that had devised it: the Catholic Church in England was hoist with its own petard.
There were other requirements too. Subjects were not to speak in a derogatory fashion about the new Prayer Book, nor to cause a clergyman to use any other form of weekly liturgy than the one specified by the Queen’s officers. The penalties for this were fines of 100, then 400 marks, and, thereafter, life imprisonment. And they were not to be caught defending the papal supremacy; not unless they were prepared to forfeit first their goods, then their liberty, then their life.
But so long as they kept their weekly appointment at the Queen’s new Church and their mouths tightly shut, there was nothing to stop them benefiting from Elizabeth’s lenient attitude towards Catholicism. And this was lenience rather than a move towards outright religious tolerance—a lenience born of political realism. There was no question that Elizabeth wanted to eliminate the Catholic Church in England. There were few, if any, sixteenth century monarchs who could afford to tolerate so strong a rival within their own dominions and Elizabeth’s crown was more vulnerable than most. But realistically this was not going to happen overnight. So the Oath of Supremacy was tendered to all office holders. Anyone who could not swear ‘that the queen is the only supreme governor of this realm…as well in all spiritual or ecclesiastical things…as temporal’ was evicted from that office and denied any further position in the new administration, but elsewhere Elizabeth’s behaviour remained conciliatory.
Deleted from the new Prayer Book was the offensive Edwardian reference to ‘the tyranny of the Bishop of Rome’. The new Communion service became a careful amalgam of phrases from successive earlier prayer books. It was a mouthful to say—‘The body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul into everlasting life: and take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on him in thine heart by faith, with thanksgiving’—but it remained sufficiently ambiguous to satisfy both those who believed in the real presence in the sacrament and those who denied it. Churchgoers seeking the Virgin Mary were offered a newer and more vital virgin to adore: ‘they keep the birthday of queen Elizabeth in the most solemn way on the 7th day of September, which is the eve of the feast of the Mother of God’, wrote the Catholic Edward Rishton. And although the churches were stripped of their decoration, they still hung on to ‘the organs, the ecclesiastical chants, the crucifix, copes, [and] candles’. Rishton observed: ‘The queen retained many of the ancient customs and ceremonies…partly for the honour and illustration of this new church, and partly for the sake of persuading her own subjects and foreigners into the belief that she was not far…from the Catholic faith.’ It convinced the French ambassador. He wrote home, duly impressed, that the English ‘were in religion very nigh to them’. And, Rishton added, ‘the Queen and her ministers considered themselves most fortunate in that those who clung to…[Catholicism]…publicly accepted, or by their presence outwardly sanctioned, in some way, the new rites they had prescribed. They did not care so much about the inward belief of these men.’ No one, it seemed, was keen to start opening windows into men’s souls at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign.
And if the new Anglican Church was built upon the bedrock of compromise, then many who attended it did so in the same spirit. When, in the summer of 1562, a number of prominent Catholics approached the Spanish ambassador, and through him Rome, to ask if they might worship in the Queen’s new Church, the answer they received (in the negative) was not considered absolute enough to act upon, so worship there they did. When many local priests became aware of the level of Catholic feeling in their parishes they made adjustments accordingly; so Catholics might have ‘Mass said secretly in their own houses by those very priests who in church publicly celebrated the [Protestant] liturgy’. To compromise made sound political sense.
But could it ever make spiritual sense? The notorious sixteenth century Cambridge academic, Dr Andrew Perne of Peterhouse, ‘was known to have changed his religion three or four times to suit the change of ruler’, but when Perne was asked by a close friend ‘to tell her honestly and simply which was the holy religion that would see her safe to heaven’, he replied, ‘I beg you never to tell anyone what I am going to say…If you wish, you can live in the religion which the Queen and the whole kingdom profess—you will have a good life, you will have none of the vexations which Catholics have to suffer. But don’t die in it. Die in faith and communion with the Catholic Church, that is, if you want to save your soul.’ Perne never had the chance to heed his own advice: he died suddenly, on the way back to his room after dining with the Archbishop of Canterbury, caught out not only in the wrong faith, but also in the headquarters of that faith, Lambeth Palace itself. But this was the dilemma facing all Englishmen now: how did you square your political survival with your spiritual salvation, if, like vast numbers of your fellow countrymen, you still regarded yourself as Catholic? Happy were those whose conscience and the law agreed. For those others, the future, both in this world and the next, looked much more uncertain.
In November 1561, three years into Elizabeth’s reign, the mayor of Oxford had the unpleasant task of informing the Privy Council that ‘there were not three houses in [Oxford] that were not filled with papists’. And, added the new Spanish ambassador, Bishop Alvaro de la Quadra, in his regular gossip-filled letter to the Duchess of Parma, ‘the Council were far from pleased, and told the Mayor to take care not to say such a thing elsewhere’. But to those with any knowledge of the city’s past, this level of defiance will have come as no surprise: Oxford was running true to form. Deep in the cellars below the Mitre Inn on the High Street, at the Swan Inn, the Star Inn and the Catherine Wheel, Oxford’s Catholics were meeting in secret and in droves to celebrate their forbidden mass.* (#ulink_bb3a3b5b-a54f-599d-a6bc-fc396c91b792)
If the city of Oxford was reluctant to embrace the new Church, then its university was proving even more mutinous. In May 1559 the Swiss Protestant Heinrich Bullinger was confidentially advised against sending his son to college at Oxford, for ‘it is as yet a den of thieves, and of those who hate the light’. That same month John Jewel, now Bishop of Salisbury, was noting with some frustration that ‘our universities are in a most lamentable condition: there are not above two in Oxford of our sentiments’. And when Elizabeth’s visitors arrived at the university that year to enforce the new religious settlement, they were daunted by the strength of Catholic opposition they encountered.
At New College they avoided asking everyone to subscribe to the Oaths of Supremacy and Uniformity for fear of the number of refusals, reported Nicholas Sanders, a fellow of that college. The Bishop of Winchester, the visitor responsible for New College, found similar hostility at his other wards, Trinity, Corpus Christi and Magdalen. Here, too, he declined to look closely. Instead, he and his fellow visitors concentrated their attention on what they saw as the root of the problem: the men in charge. Within two years only one of Oxford’s college heads appointed during the previous reign remained in office and with that the Council seemed to be content. Let these new replacements keep their house in order and play the heavy hand. That the sole surviving college to retain its Marian head, New College, was the scene of widespread, Council-led purges throughout the first decade of the reign merely seemed to support the wisdom of the Government’s policy.
Then fate stepped in to send the precarious balance of European power reeling. In July 1559 an unlucky tilt at a French court tournament left King Henri II dead, his fifteen-year-old heir, François, in the sway of his zealous cousins the Guises, and his teenage daughter-in-law, Mary Stuart, sufficiently emboldened to have herself heralded with cries of ‘Make way for the Queen of England!’ A nettled Elizabeth was soon persuaded by her Council to send money to help the Protestant, anti-French rebellion in Scotland and quickly the situation spiralled into open confrontation.
In early 1560, mindful of the need to present a strong show of national unity in times of danger and fearful that the conflict had fallen far too neatly into battle lines of an awkwardly religious nature, Elizabeth sent her visitors back to Oxford. Soon Bishop de la Quadra was reporting home that ‘Oxford students…[known to be Catholic]…have been taken…[and imprisoned]…in great numbers’. Was this how it was going to be from now on? Each time an enemy threatened was any Englishman not seen to be standing foursquare behind the Queen’s new church and openly obeying her laws liable to arrest and imprisonment? The detention of six Oxford students the following year, for resisting the mayor’s attempts to remove their college crucifix, seemed to confirm this. As Elizabeth braced herself for the return home to Scotland of the newly widowed Mary, it was more the openness of the students’ defiance that earned them their prison sentence: after all, the ultra-conservative Elizabeth still kept a crucifix in her own royal chapel.
A pattern was being established, a pattern that those English Catholics arrested for attending mass at the French embassy in February 1560, even as the situation in Scotland worsened, might have been able to spot for themselves. The rationale behind it was simple. Had England’s fortunes been entirely separate from those of Europe then Elizabeth and her government could have been content to settle back and let the dismantling of the English Catholic Church be a gradual one, sure in the knowledge that in time the majority of their countrymen would come round to their way of thinking. But England was as entangled with the rest of Europe as religion ever was with politics.* (#ulink_f536bbcf-37ca-5227-bab7-641aaf46db88) It was a part of the Christian Church, the Church that had bound Europe together. That Church was now divided into factions and while Europe was still known as Christendom, England, like it or not, was integral to that factional struggle. And it was vital to Europe’s equilibrium: its fragile diplomatic alliances with France and Spain in turn keeping either of those two nations from ever singly dominating the European stage—a necessity for Europe, but a constant irritation to successive generations of ambitious French and Spanish monarchs.
With this the case, conflict was inevitable. For though Elizabeth might have no stomach for religious persecution, still she needed to keep her throne safe from predatory interlopers from across the narrow English Channel. And though England’s Catholics might be loyal to England, still they began to find themselves the focus of increasing and unwelcome Government-imposed restrictions every time affairs in mainland Europe took a turn for the worse.
But if this was a pattern that would emerge more clearly as Elizabeth’s reign progressed, then Oxford’s particular place within that pattern was predictable from the start. And from the start Elizabeth tried to forestall it.
On Saturday, 31 August 1566, ‘about 5 or 6 of the clock at night’, Queen Elizabeth I rode into Oxford. Her wooing of the city, and its university, had begun.
At the head of the royal procession were the Queen’s heralds. Behind them came the Earl of Leicester, in his official role as Chancellor of the university, then the Mayor of Oxford and his party of aldermen, the noblemen of the court, and finally Elizabeth herself. Her
‘chariot was open on all sides, and on a gilded seat in the height of regal magnificence reposed the Queen. Her head-dress was a marvel of woven gold, and glittered with pearls and other wonderful gems; her gown was of the most brilliant scarlet silk woven with gold, partly concealed by a purple cloak lined with ermine after the manner of a triumphal robe. Beside the chariot rode the royal cursitors, resplendent in coats of cloth of gold, and the marshals, who were kept busy preventing the crowds from pressing too near to the person of the Queen…The royal guard, magnificent in gold and scarlet, brought up the rear. Of these there were about two hundred…and on their shoulders they bore…iron clubs like battle-axes.’
Through the north gate they streamed. Down Northgate Street (now Cornmarket), where the scholars who lined the road sank awe-struck to their knees and called out Vivat Regina Elizabetha, hearing their cry taken up by the townspeople leaning from the windows and crammed precariously together on the roof-tops above them. To Carfax, where Giles Lawrence, Oxford’s Regius Professor, welcomed the Queen with an oration in Greek to which Elizabeth responded warmly in the same tongue, thanking Lawrence for his speech and praising it as the best she had heard in that language, adding coyly ‘we would answer you presently, but with this great company we are somewhat abashed’. Lawrence was transfixed.
On down Fish Street (St Aldates) the procession flowed, to Christ Church College, where the gate and walls were festooned with verses in Latin and Greek in admiration of Elizabeth and where, beneath a canopy borne by four Doctors of the university, the Queen was ushered slowly across the quadrangle into the cool and calm of the great cathedral. Here Elizabeth knelt in prayer as Dr Godwin, Christ Church’s Dean, gave thanks for her safe arrival in the city. To the sound of cornets the choir sang the Te Deum and then wearily Elizabeth slipped away through the gardens in the lengthening dusk, to her lodgings in the east wing, to prepare for this, her latest charm offensive.
It was the Queen’s first visit to Oxford. An earlier attempt two years before had been called off at the last moment when plague broke out in the city. But this delay merely ensured that by the time Elizabeth made her dramatic appearance at the north gate anticipation had grown to fever pitch. It also meant that those charged with arranging the visit had left little to chance.
On the Wednesday before the Queen’s arrival the Earl of Leicester and Sir William Cecil had ridden the eight miles from the Palace of Woodstock to Oxford, through the sluicing rain of a late summer downpour, to check for themselves that everything was in order. Leicester, as Oxford’s Chancellor, was host for the week and with his ambition to marry the Queen still intact at this date—just five years earlier, with his brother-in-law acting as go-between, he had approached the Spanish ambassador and offered to return England to the Catholic Church if Spain backed their wedding, a far cry from his later reincarnation as the scourge of English Catholicism—there was more at stake for him here than mere proprietorial embarrassment should Oxford’s hospitality fail to please the Queen. But for Sir William Cecil, Elizabeth’s Principal Secretary of State and her chief adviser on all policies relating to Church and foreign affairs, Oxford’s performance was a matter for greater concern still.
Each day of the royal visit Elizabeth and her entourage would attend debates and disputations, the art of which formed the basis of every student’s education. On the Tuesday a rising young Oxford star, Edmund Campion of St John’s College, would triumph in the Natural Philosophy Disputation, proposing ‘that the tides are caused by the moon’s motion’. Elizabeth, who in later life would be revered as the moon goddess, Cynthia, the ‘wide ocean’s empress’, was delighted with Campion’s speech; Cecil and Leicester immediately offered to become his patrons.* (#ulink_aeccd0f6-b918-5271-baef-e801c3d14772) But it was indicative of the Government’s continued anxiety over the problem of Oxford’s religious insubordination that Cecil had provided the students in advance with a list of preferred subjects for these debates. Thursday’s Divinity Disputation took as its Council-chosen theme ‘Whether subjects may fight against wicked princes?’, allowing little scope for awkward theological reasoning.† (#ulink_e97aec44-d208-527d-b26b-ac515888dc3f) It would have been a brave—and short-lived—undergraduate who dared to denounce Elizabeth’s break with Rome as wicked to her face; more embarrassing and more damaging still to the royal party would have been a spirited and unopposed defence of the Catholic faith. Oxford’s young students were to be given little opportunity to air their religious grievances.
But Elizabeth favoured the carrot over the stick whenever possible. In addition she held a deep and unshakeable regard for learning and was determined to see Oxford back in the vanguard of European scholarship after so many decades in the wilderness of religious upheaval.* (#ulink_1ae8934a-d767-58fb-8369-7f6e7deb5690) She had a captive audience of some seventeen hundred students—all of whom had elected to remain at the university despite the term being officially over—and if any queen knew how to entrance an audience it was Elizabeth.
So Edmund Campion won his court patronage. George Coriat won half a sovereign. Tobie Matthew of Christ Church won the coveted title of Queen’s Scholar, which led to a lifetime of royal preferment and his eventual appointment as Archbishop of York. And all of them won the lavish praise and attention of a queen acutely conscious that her visit needed to serve as a fast-acting panacea for the ills afflicting Oxford. There was banqueting each evening and boisterous theatre in Christ Church’s Great Hall, transformed for the occasion into a gleaming, golden ‘Roman palace’. And then there was Elizabeth’s own speech, given at the church of St Mary the Virgin before the entire university on the final evening of her stay—a speech delivered in faultless, eloquent Latin, a speech in honour of Oxford and of academia, a speech that was welcomed and applauded with unqualified enthusiasm.
As Elizabeth rode out of Oxford the following day, surrounded once again by her glittering procession and by a city liberally hung with verses expressing grief at her departure, she had done much to heal the old wounds left by her father and her brother’s brutal and bullish enforcement of religious change. Her leave-taking was as sincere as it was warm: ‘Farewell, the worthy University of Oxford; farewell, my good subjects there; farewell, my dear Scholars, and pray God prosper your studies.’ Few could have done better under the circumstances. The only problem was it had all taken place several years too late.
Five years before Elizabeth’s visit a twenty-nine-year-old Lancastrian, a one-time student of Oriel College and former principal of St Mary’s Hall, had left Oxford for Flanders and the Low Countries. There, he was a welcome addition to the exiles of Louvain. And there, just seven years later, at the university town of Douai in the province of Artois, he would rent a ‘large…and very convenient’ house from where he would attempt to turn the ebbing fortunes of English Catholicism. ‘We cannot’, he would later write, ‘wait for better times; we must act now (to make them better).’ If the recalcitrant students of Oxford were to be summarily expelled from college whenever Europe threatened and if the men and women of England were to continue compromising their salvation in the name of political survival, then Dr William Allen had found the answer: use the former to educate the latter. It was a simple solution and it would prove devastatingly effective.
* (#ulink_72d8d164-b07f-5b22-9fbc-c965dd843ae6) When Thomas Cromwell was made Chancellor of Cambridge in 1535, on the execution of Cardinal John Fisher, Oxford graduates saw Government preferment steered past them towards the students of Cambridge.
* (#ulink_09b9c0f2-26ec-531f-8605-f19170ee8192) Each college was provided at its foundation with an external ‘visitor’—part trouble-shooting ombudsman, part spiritual inquisitor.
* (#ulink_94bc8e37-daae-591e-9482-8822cee90f96) De Feria believed that the leading Catholics, in both the Commons and the Lords, had failed to put up a convincing fight during the crucial parliamentary debates from which the settlement sprang. However the Catholics were also under-represented in these debates: ten out of the twenty-six bishoprics were empty when Parliament opened on 25 January.
* (#ulink_c991a398-9e72-5200-9127-fb0a86465e23) Mrs Williams of the Swan was more than usually defiant in receiving Catholic priests: her husband was a justice of the peace and a city alderman.
* (#ulink_296c5835-bb22-5c0b-ada0-75782338b121) England’s sense of growing isolation from the rest of Europe, in spite of these entanglements, features strongly in the State Papers of the time. The Spanish ambassador reported back to Philip II a speech made by Sir William Cecil to the House of Commons in 1563, in which Cecil declared, ‘They had no one now to trust but themselves, for the Germans, although they had promised the Queen great things, had done nothing and had broken their word.’
* (#ulink_affaf761-244b-512f-9d3d-08848e4483ff) She is depicted as such in the Rainbow Portrait of c.1600 and was the subject of Walter Ralegh’s Book of the Ocean to Cynthia, in which he describes the anguished nature of his relationship with the Queen.
† (#ulink_affaf761-244b-512f-9d3d-08848e4483ff) Cecil’s own choice of suitably non-controversial debating matter for the week ahead was ‘Why is ophthalmia catching, but not dropsy or gout?’
* (#ulink_d5f97405-85dd-53a3-8dc0-8c2a16f81426) At the start of the sixteenth century Erasmus had placed English learning second only to that found in the Italian universities. Elizabeth’s concern over the standard of education in England extended as far as exempting schoolmasters from paying tax.
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Alice Hogge
Тип: электронная книга
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Дата публикации: 25.04.2024
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О книге: A thrilling account of treachery, loyalty and martyrdom in Elizabethan England from an exceptional new writer.As darkness fell on the evening of Friday, 28 October 1588, just weeks after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, two young Englishmen landed in secret on a Norfolk beach. They were Jesuit priests. Their aim was to achieve by force of argument what the Armada had failed to do by force of arms: return England to the Catholic Church.Eighteen years later their mission had been shattered by the actions of a small group of terrorists, the Gunpowder Plotters; they themselves had been accused of designing ‘that most horrid and hellish conspiracy’; and the future of every Catholic they had come to save depended on the silence of an Oxford joiner, builder of priest-holes, being tortured in the Tower of London.‘God’s Secret Agents’ tells the story of Elizabeth’s ‘other’ England, a country at war with an unseen enemy, a country peopled – according to popular pamphlets and Government proclamations – with potential traitors, fifth-columnists and assassins. And it tells this story from the perspective of that unseen ‘enemy’, England’s Catholics, a beleaguered, alienated minority, struggling to uphold its faith.Ultimately, ‘God’s Secret Agents’ is the story of men who would die for their cause undone by men who would kill for it.