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

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СКАЧАТЬ God the prime of youth ’ere it impair,

      Lest he the dregs of crooked age deny.¹⁹

      Whatever their motives for escaping to Douai, at William Allen’s disposal now was the prime of Oxford youth.

      At first Allen did not envisage sending the graduates of his Douai seminary back home to England as missionaries; the impetus for this was Jean Vendeville’s and came later. Rather, he thought to prepare them for the happy moment—Elizabeth’s death or a foreign invasion—when England would again need Catholic priests. But the syllabus he devised for them was a blueprint training manual for a very specific kind of ‘holy war’.²⁰

      The students would remain at the college for three years. In that time they would learn Greek and Hebrew to augment their existing knowledge of Latin. With these three languages at their disposal they could read the scriptures in their original form, so as ‘to save them from being entangled in the sophisms which heretics extract from the properties and meanings of words’. They would study their Bibles with painstaking detail, working through the Old Testament at least twelve times and the New Testament sixteen times. And each week there would be debates in which the students would ‘defend in turn not only the Catholic side against the texts of Scripture alleged by the heretics, but also the heretical side against those which Catholics bring forward’. Thus armed, they would ‘all know better how to prove our doctrines by argument and to refute the contrary opinions’.

      For the advanced students there would be a further course of study: English, the ‘vulgar tongue’. ‘In this respect’, wrote Allen, ‘the heretics, however ignorant they may be on other points, have the advantage over many of the more learned Catholics.’ The Protestants’ use of the Bible in translation gave them an advantage over Allen’s priests when preaching to those unschooled in Latin. English classes would correct the inaccuracy and ‘unpleasant hesitation’ with which many of his trainee missionaries interpreted their scriptures. And William Allen was preparing for a war in which any inaccuracy or hesitation could have devastating consequences.

      It was to be a war of words and will in which the sharpest weapons would be the combatant’s ability to argue his cause clearly and persuasively, and his unwavering belief in the rightness of that cause. To this latter end it was Allen’s ‘first and foremost study’ to stir up ‘in the minds of Catholics, especially of those who are preparing here for the Lord’s work, a zealous and just indignation against the heretics’ and to set before ‘the eyes of the students the…utter desolation of all things sacred…the chief impieties, blasphemies, absurdities, cheats and trickeries of the English heretics’. ‘The result’, wrote Allen, ‘is that they not only hold the heretics in perfect detestation, but they also marvel and feel sorrow of heart that there should be any found so wicked, simple and reckless of their salvation.’

      It was incendiary teaching. And it proved overwhelmingly popular. In December 1575 Allen was summoned to Rome to advise the Pope on the foundation of a second seminary there. By the following year the original Douai College had grown to fill three houses. Swarms of students were ‘daily coming, or rather flying to the college’, they were among ‘the best wits in England’ and many were former students of Oxford University.²¹

      But not even Douai could escape the decade’s disease: paranoia. Throughout the 1570s, as Philip of Spain’s army battled to stamp out Protestantism in the Spanish-owned Netherlands, the rumours spread that Allen’s students were spies for the Catholic cause. An entry in the Douai Diary of 27 June 1577 reads: ‘Dr Bristow admonished us to be more guarded in our behaviour and, as far as possible, to walk less frequently in the streets, because the common people had begun…to spread reports and excite murmurs against us.’ By August the students were whispering about a coming raid on the college. Finally, in the spring of 1578 the seminary was expelled from the city. The trainee missionaries decamped to Reims, the French university city, where, under the protection of the powerful Guise family, they hoped to continue their studies free from suspicion. It was not to be. By September 1578 Allen was writing to the Governor of Reims, begging him to calm the populace’s fears that his students were armed English insurrectionists who went about in disguise to check and measure the town’s fortifications.²²

      But some of the paranoia was justified. On the feast of Candlemas, 2 February 1579, a former stationer’s apprentice, Anthony Munday, and his friend Thomas Nowell arrived at the newly formed English College in Rome. Since William Allen’s visit to the city four years earlier, the plans to open a seminary on the site of the old English pilgrim’s hostel had come on apace. By the time of Munday’s visit the college already held forty-two students, including the young Robert Southwell.²³

      Munday and Nowell were offered eight days’ entertainment at the college, ‘which by the Pope was granted to such Englishmen as come thither’. For Munday the invitation was followed by an awkward encounter. Earlier in his adventures he had been mistaken by a group of young Englishmen in Paris for the son of a prominent Catholic gentleman. This had afforded him a warm welcome and a number of letters of introduction to Rome so Munday had done nothing to disabuse his new friends of their notion. But now in Rome he was greeted by a priest who knew this Catholic gentleman well. Munday spent an uncomfortable evening parrying questions and ‘was put to so hard a shift that I knew not well what to say’. When the supper-bell rang he fled with relief and thereafter did his best to avoid his interrogator.²⁴

      In the days that followed Munday had ample time to record in detail his impressions of seminary life, from morning study and prayers, through the daily tuition in divinity, logic and rhetoric, to the student chatter around the fireside at night. But Anthony Munday was a Protestant. In time he would become a professional informer.

Munday’s diary of his stay in Rome is the first recorded memoir written by a spy. It must, however, be read with a certain scepticism: his target audience was a paying public eager to believe the worst about the seminary, and his literary credibility is dubious.* Moreover, his claims are suspicious. The students, he wrote, competed amongst themselves as to ‘who shall speak worst of her Majesty’, while their teachers were as insulting about her ministers: Francis Bacon appears as ‘the Butcher’s son, the great guts, oh he would fry well with a Faggot’; Ambrose Dudley becomes ‘a good fat whoreson, to make Bacon of’. (Significantly, Sir Thomas Bromley, to whom Munday dedicated the work, does not feature in this list of gibes.† ) And somewhat at odds with the ill-concealed relish of Munday’s descriptions is his politic disclaimer that all these ministers were, of course, ‘honourable personages, to whom the words do offer great abuse, and whom I unfeignedly reverence and honour’.²⁵

But if much of Munday’s account reads like the work of an entertaining profiteer looking to sell a few books at the Government’s expense, certain facts in his story do ring true, particularly when viewed in conjunction with William Allen’s syllabus at Douai and Reims. Each mealtime the students listened to readings from the Bible to arm them for the fight against heresy. They took part in daily disputations to sharpen their skills in debate. And encouraged by Allen, who explained that ‘We must needs confess that all these things have come upon our country through our sins’, they undertook public penance for the most minor infringement of the college rules. Munday, who in his brief stay ‘was always apt to break one order or other’, wrote with feeling about these penances. But it was his description of the students’ self-flagellation that was most arresting. The penitent student entered the dining room dressed in a long canvas robe with СКАЧАТЬ