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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ majesty, [who] have, by their subtle and crafty dealing to advance themselves…abused the queen, disordered the realm, and now, lastly, seek and procure the destruction of the nobility’.¹

      But to rally supporters to their cause the rebels cloaked themselves in the flag of Catholicism. They marched to Durham Cathedral where they tore up the new English Prayer Book and Bible, demanding the restoration of ‘the true and catholic religion’. If this was what it took to spur the slumbering northern counties into action behind them then Percy and Neville were more than happy to make it their campaign slogan—neither man felt any long-standing loyalty to the new Church. Hidden further down the list were their more sought-after demands: the immediate arrest and trial of Cecil and the release from prison of the disgraced Duke of Norfolk.²

      Elizabeth’s response was swift and uncharacteristically brutal. Between 500 and 800 men, all of very little account, were rounded up and executed. Percy and Neville fled the country and the decade closed on a note of queasy anticipation. It did not help that since 1568, Mary Queen of Scots had been living in England as Elizabeth’s prisoner. This was the Mary, half Scottish, half French, wholly Catholic, who had claimed Elizabeth’s crown as her own some ten years earlier. Mary had lost her French throne on the death of her first husband, her Scottish throne on the murder of her second. Now separated from her third husband, there were many who thought that, as Elizabeth’s presumed heir, she was entitled to another throne yet—England’s.

      Then in February 1570 a new Pope, Pius V, a fanatical firebrand of great zeal but uncertain common sense, took it upon himself to fuel the conflagration further. He issued his bull Regnans in Excelsis, excommunicating ‘Elizabeth, pretended queen of England’, releasing English Catholics from their allegiance to her, and openly encouraging her overthrow, an appalling concept in a world that believed in a monarch’s divine right to rule. And the rulers of Europe were duly appalled, particularly as none was at present in the position to make good Pius’s threat. Philip II of Spain refused to let the bull be published anywhere in his dominions, openly reassuring Elizabeth that he had no intention of breaking the Anglo-Spanish amity. Privately, he complained that the Pope had ‘allowed himself to be carried away by his zeal’. The Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian fired off an angry response to Pius, receiving in return the peevish reply: ‘Why she [Elizabeth] makes such a stir about this sentence we cannot quite understand; for if she thinks so much of our sentence and excommunication, why does she not return to the bosom of the Church, from which she went out? If she thinks it of no consequence, why does she make such a stir about it?’³

      But Pius had achieved what Protestant Parliamentarians had so far only dreamed of. In showing that a strict adherence to the Catholic faith was now mutually incompatible with loyalty to Elizabeth, he had bound Anglicanism to Englishness more firmly than ever. And he had given to an anxious English nation the cast-iron proof that the more devout the Catholic, the more danger they presented to the realm. The problem for England’s Catholics was that as the roots of Elizabeth’s new Church began to take hold, the only active Catholics left in the country were, perforce, devout ones. When Edwin Sandys, Bishop of London, opened the Parliamentary session of 1571 with a sermon at Westminster Abbey warning ‘This liberty, that men may openly profess diversity of religion, must needs be dangerous’, he revealed just how important to the nation’s sense of security a solid connection between Church and State had become. He continued, ‘One God, one king, one faith, one profession is fit for one Monarchy and Commonwealth. Division weakeneth.’⁴

Paranoia ran rife throughout the 1570s, stalking through the courts of Europe, trailing terror and swift acts of bloody reprisal in its wake. In 1572 some two thousand French Protestants were slaughtered by their Catholic countrymen in Paris on St Bartholomew’s Eve, an act that imprinted itself indelibly upon the consciousness of every European Protestant; the French Catholics responsible claimed they had attacked only because they thought they were about to be murdered themselves. Continent-wide, an epidemic of fear and suspicion was spreading. The ideological gulf between Catholicism and Protestantism had reached unparalleled proportions. For the Protestants, the sight of a renewed and invigorated Catholic Church—leaner and keener since the Council of Trent had given it a much needed shake-up—lent substance to the rumours that the Catholics were regrouping for a crusading attack against them.* For the Catholics, meanwhile, the consolidation of the Protestant position only increased the fear that this insidious spread of revolutionary thought would continue, destroying the traditional structure of the civilized world and consigning everyone in it to the fires of hell. Not surprisingly there was little room for compromise. The very words ‘Papist’ and ‘Heretic’ carried sufficient emotional charge to unite one side in loathing of the other.⁵

      To come of age in the 1570s, like John Gerard in Lancashire and Nicholas Owen in Oxford, was to grow to awareness in the uneasy stillness that heralds a distant but inevitable storm. And picked out brightly against the decade’s darkening sky was a series of events, the intervals between which might be counted out like the silence between lightning and thunder to show how fast the storm was approaching.

Early in 1573 a package of letters from the Continent fell into the hands of Bishop Edwin Sandys. Sandys dispatched a party of royal messengers—the ominously named pursuivants—to bring in the intended recipients, and the pursuivants took the well-trodden road to Oxford.† ⁶

      There, they rounded up a handful of students for questioning, but one of the names on their list was missing: Cuthbert Mayne, a West Countryman and member of St John’s College, was away visiting relatives. Friends quickly passed word to the student that it would be unwise for him to return to university and soon Mayne found himself boarding a ship off the coast of Cornwall and sailing for Flanders and the English College at Douai.⁷

      Over the next few years many more packages arrived in Oxford. Their contents were identical—invitations, from one friend to another, to join the growing fraternity of students overseas—and their summonses were answered by vast numbers of Oxford’s disaffected undergraduates. Such was the siren call of Douai.

      Then, in 1574, just a year after Mayne’s hurried departure to the Continent, four other young Englishmen—one a former fellow of Mayne’s old college, St John’s—made a second and even more significant Channel crossing. Their names were Lewis Barlow, Martin Nelson, Thomas Metham and Henry Shaw. They were recent graduates of the Douai College and all were newly ordained Catholic priests. Their journey took them from the Low Countries back home again, in secret, to England. Dr William Allen’s solution had been put in motion.⁸

      The English College of the University of Douai, William Allen’s brainchild, was born out of frustration. Allen had departed Oxford in 1561 refusing to swear the Oath of Supremacy required of him by the university authorities, and his flight had taken him as far as the University of Louvain in the Low Countries. There he discovered a flourishing community of English exiles living in two large houses, to which they had given the names Oxford and Cambridge and from which they released a stream of anti-Protestant publications to be smuggled back to England. Allen set to work with a will. When ill health forced him to return home in the summer of 1562, he found among the leaderless English Catholics a religious apathy in stark contrast to the vigour of Louvain.⁹

      For the next two and a half years Allen toured England, trying single-handedly, but with isolated success, to communicate a sense of Louvain’s vitality СКАЧАТЬ