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

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СКАЧАТЬ recent ruling that Catholics should not attend Church of England services had been widely ignored. Those ‘who believed the faith in their hearts and heard mass at home when they could’ were still frequenting their local parish churches, heedless of the dangers of this ‘damnable sin of schism’, wrote Allen. No matter how they blamed the Government’s laws for ‘their unlawful acts’, England’s Catholics were heading for ‘the miserable abyss of destruction’. Elizabeth’s policy seemed to be working: the old religion was dying by degrees—and not through persecution but through isolation and lack of spiritual guidance. Indeed, it was a measure of the Government’s live and let live policy at the time that Allen was permitted to remain so long in England, given his efforts to persuade his friends to break the law. But by the spring of 1565, aware that the Government’s patience was not to be tried indefinitely and worn down by the Sisyphean nature of his chosen task, Allen departed for Louvain once more. There the situation at home continued to haunt him. The remedy, though, proved elusive.¹⁰

      Then in the autumn of 1567 Allen travelled to Rome in search of a position as chaplain to the English Hospice there. The opening did not materialize and he set off back to Flanders, accompanied by his friend Dr Jean Vendeville of the University of Douai. Vendeville had just failed to persuade Pope Pius to support his proposal for a crusade against the Turks, but the two friends’ conversation over the course of their journey north delivered up an answer to their respective disappointments: couple Vendeville’s thwarted missionary zeal with Allen’s desire to save England’s wavering Catholics. So began the ‘oasis in the wilderness of exile’.¹¹

      Within a few weeks of its opening, on 29 September 1568, Vendeville was writing that the new English College boasted a handful of men ‘of great ability and promise’. And from the start the Douai seminary looked very much like being an Oxford affair. Among its first members were John Marshall, former Dean of Christ Church College, Richard Bristow, MA of Christ Church and fellow of Exeter College, and Edward Rishton, MA of Exeter College. Only one of the new English students, John White, was not an Oxford man.¹²

      What news of this reached Oxford? What shape did the rumours take as quickly and quietly they spread about the town? That William Allen had founded a college where exiled scholars ‘might live and study together more profitably than apart’? That he was preparing a school of men ‘to restore religion when the proper moment should arrive’? That Dr Vendeville saw England as the next great mission?¹³

      For many this was welcome news. The Parliament of 1563 had further extended the Oath of Supremacy to all in, or taking, holy orders, to all lawyers, MPs and schoolmasters, and to all university graduates. For good measure, the House of Commons was also insisting on harsher punishments for those refusing to swear to the oath. As Sir William Cecil observed: ‘such be the humours of the Commons House, as they think nothing sharp enough against Papists’. A first offence brought with it the penalties of praemunire: loss of lands and life imprisonment. For a second refusal the sentence was death. The new measures brought sharply into focus the choices available to Oxford’s students.¹⁴

      Loyalty to Elizabeth carried with it the promise of advancement in a country crying out for new priests for its newest Church. It might also be a path to high office in the service of a queen looking to employ ‘men meaner in substance, and younger in years’ in her Government, in place of those ambitious aristocrats dismissive of a female ruler and powerful enough to challenge her. Loyalty to Elizabeth was something Elizabeth herself, with her charm, her flirtatiousness and her calculated displays of majesty, was most keen to encourage—not surprisingly given the vulnerability of her throne.¹⁵

      Loyalty to your conscience, on the other hand, led to certain ruin: to separation from friends, estrangement from family and crippling poverty—just as the nation’s economy began to stabilize. A letter home from one young Englishman who chose conscience over country illustrated the emotional and financial cost of his decision: ‘Pray crave my parents’ blessing for me, and confer with my mother, and ascertain whether if I should come home, it would turn my father to me.’ And, he added desperately: ‘my wants are very great. Pray be a means to them [my parents] to help me’. Another letter, this time from the exiled Thomas, Lord Copley, uncle to the Jesuit-poet Robert Southwell, set out the price of conscience clearer still: ‘I love my country, friends, and kinsfolk, but I must be content patiently to forbear the comfort of them all, as I am taught by our Saviour himself, rather than to forsake him’. And William Shakespeare, in his play Richard II of c.1595, would sum up the pains of exile in a couplet:

      Then thus I turn me from my country’s light, To dwell in solemn shades of endless night.¹⁶

      So why was any Oxford student prepared to make this sacrifice? Of course, for some it must always have been for the sheer excitement of going up against the Establishment. But it was one thing to attend secret mass at the Mitre Inn, to pass on in stolen whispers the latest news from Douai, to argue long into the night in the rarefied, ivoried, once-removed atmosphere of academia—quite another to go over to the other side altogether.

      For John Gerard, his reason was that of tradition; perhaps, too, an unspoken need to settle an old score: ‘My parents had always been Catholics,’ he wrote, ‘and on that account had suffered much at the hands of an heretical government.’ (Curiously, his was a self-censored family history: his grandfather, Thomas Gerard, had been burnt at the stake at Smithfield in London on 30 July 1540, as a convert to Lutheranism.) In Gerard’s fellow Jesuit, Robert Southwell’s, case, Catholicism was ‘the belief which to all my friends by descent and pedigree is, in manner, hereditary’. But for numerous others—such as Cuthbert Mayne, raised by his uncle, a Protestant parson—the old faith was not their old faith. Rather, the ‘Old religion [had] renewed its youth’ from among the ranks of many families who had already forsaken it. Those students who chose to leave Oxford for Douai, to sacrifice a life of opportunity for one of danger and penury, did so on the basis of ideological certainty.¹⁷

      For some, their certainty sprang from a conviction that Parliament, ‘which has not long used to judge causes of faith, or prescribe ecclesiastical laws’ (so wrote Lord Copley), had no mandate to tell them what to believe. Others, looking about them at the bloodshed and chaos, the failed harvests and famine that had so blighted England in the preceding decades, saw God’s hand at work—their country was being punished for the sin of challenging the established Church. For such students, on the brink of entering this world of bloodshed and chaos for themselves, here was a way of drawing its poison. In Robert Southwell’s words, it now became their ‘duty…by the gentleness of [their] manners, the fire of [their] charity, by innocence of life and an example of all virtues, so to shine upon the world as to lift up the Res Christiana that now droops so sadly, and to build up again from the ruins what others by their vices have brought so low’. Still more young undergraduates believed that England had been betrayed by its Government—a Government more concerned with its own immediate survival than with the salvation of the nation. Elizabeth herself might have learned the value of political compromise at a very early age; most Oxford students had never had that need and saw no reason to acquire it now—not with the souls of their countrymen at stake. Later they would be charged with betraying those same countrymen to Spain—their defence would be that the true betrayal had not been theirs, but had come many decades prior to them setting out for Douai.¹⁸

      In a poem of 1581-5 Robert Southwell wrote:

      Then crop the morning Rose while it is fair;

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