God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests and the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot. Alice Hogge
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      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

       Title Page

       Dedication

       Six

       Seven

       Eight

       Nine

       Ten

       Eleven

       Twelve

       Epilogue

       Author’s Note

       Appendix

       Endnotes

       Bibliography

       Index

       Acknowledgements

       About the Author

       Copyright

       About the Publisher

       One

      ‘…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.1

      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’.3

      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.4