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

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      Then on the morning of 29 November Mayne was offered his life. If he would swear on the Bible that Elizabeth was the supreme head of the Church of England he would be spared execution. Mayne refused. He went further: he reasserted his belief that England would soon be restored to the Catholic faith by the ‘secret instructors’ from Douai. And then, sealing his fate (and stepping outside the strictly apolitical role being claimed by Allen for his students), he declared that should ‘any Catholic prince…invade any realm to reform the same to the authority of the See of Rome, that then the Catholics in that realm…should be ready to assist and help them’. The offer of a reprieve was rescinded.³³

Cuthbert Mayne was ‘drawn a quarter of a mile to the place of execution, and when he was to be laid on the sled, some of the Justices moved the Sheriff’s deputy, that he would cause him to have his head laid over the car, that it might be dashed against the stones in drawing, and M. Mayne offered himself that it might be so, but the Sheriff’s deputy would not suffer it’. This sheriff’s deputy was a merciful man. He let Mayne hang until he was dead before disembowelling him, quartering him, and distributing his parts about the county for display. For his role in the affair, Sir Francis Tregian was sentenced to life imprisonment and his estates were seized and given to Sir George Carey, a cousin of the Queen.* John Stow, in his Chronicle of that year, recorded: ‘Cuthbert Maine [sic] was drawn, hanged and quartered at Launceston, in Cornwall, for preferring Roman power.’³⁴

      Cuthbert Mayne had become the Douai seminary’s first martyr. When his old master at Oxford learned of his death he exclaimed, ‘Wretch that I am, how has that novice distanced me! May he be favourable to his old friend and tutor! I shall now boast of these titles more than ever.’ Such was the power of dying for your faith, and not even the fact that Mayne had been executed as a traitor to his country could tarnish this. Yes, he had broken existing treason laws, but did anyone seriously believe that owning an out-of-date copy of a nondescript bull and a few wax discs posed a threat to national security?³⁵

      However, as the dust settled on Mayne’s quartered remains and the political post-mortem began, it was soon clear that neither side had won a decisive victory in this opening skirmish. Catholics could claim that Cuthbert Mayne was a traitor only according to the most rigid set of definitions, in regard to his possession of a papal bull, or on the basis of hypothesis alone, in regard to his attitude towards Catholic invasions. But in regard to that same attitude, the English Government could claim that Allen’s supposed political virgins were uncommonly quick to pronounce on matters apart from their faith. Blessed martyr of a persecuted Church, or secret agent of an enemy state? Cuthbert Mayne had become all things to all men. His foolishness in being caught with Agnus Deis and a papal bull, and his clumsy defence of the Pope’s powers of deposition had left Catholics confirmed in their belief that they were being penalized for their religion, and the Government confirmed in its belief that Allen’s seminarians were stirring for invasion. The battle lines had just been made clearer.

But for the young missionaries-in-training, Mayne’s execution revealed to them that here was a war they might wage for the ultimate prize: the crown of martyrdom itself.* Just months after Mayne’s death the Catacombs were unearthed beneath the city of Rome, to ecstatic celebration among Catholics: here was proof that they and their Church were the direct descendants of those early Christian martyrs, sprung from their blood and their bones. And for a new generation the chance to save that Church was being offered to them again.

      ‘Listen to our heavenly Father asking back his talents with usury; listen to the Church, the mother that bore us and nursed us, imploring our help; listen to the pitiful cries of our neighbours in danger of spiritual starvation; listen to the howling of the wolves that are spoiling the flock. The glory of your Father, the preservation of your mother, your own salvation, the safety of your brethren, are in jeopardy, and can you stand idle?…Do not, I pray you, regard such a tragedy as a joke; sleep not while the enemy watches; play not while he devours his prey; relax not in idleness and vanity while he is dabbling in your brother’s blood…See then, my dearest and most instructed youths, that you lose none of this precious time, but carry a plentiful and rich crop away from this seminary, enough to supply the public wants, and to gain for ourselves the reward of dutiful sons.’

      With such words ringing in their ears it was little wonder that, to their mentor William Allen, the student priests seemed ‘like men striving with all their might to put out a conflagration. They cannot in any way be kept back from England’.³⁶

      During Elizabeth’s first Parliament, Sir Thomas White, founder of St John’s College, Oxford and a staunch Catholic, had exclaimed in fury and despair that ‘it was unjust that a religion begun in such a miraculous way, and established by such grave men, should be abolished by a set of beardless boys’. Some twenty years on, the job of saving White’s miraculous religion had fallen to another set of beardless boys. As William Cecil would write, with an old man’s frustration at youth’s idealism, ‘The greatest number of papists is of very young men.’ In a few years’ time John Gerard and Nicholas Owen would be old enough to join their number. Meanwhile in Prague, a former fellow of White’s college, and the author of that rallying call to the students at Douai’s seminary, was about to step into the fray. His name was Edmund Campion.³⁷

* The Council of Trent met in three sessions during the mid-sixteenth century, its purpose to revivify the Roman Church, enabling it to meet the challenge of Protestantism. The Council worked to establish a set of fixed doctrinal definitions for the Catholic faith and to re-order its institutional structure, emphasizing the subordination of the entire Catholic hierarchy to the Pope. Out of the Council of Trent sprang what has been termed the Counter-Reformation, a movement almost as amorphous as the Reformation it opposed, but which can loosely be defined as the attempt at re-conquest of those parts of Christendom lost to the Catholic Church. Rome’s army of arguers, as featured in this book, was a component of this movement.

† According to a contemporary Catholic description, ‘The pursuivants [were], for the most part, bankrupts and needy fellows, either fled from their trade for debt, and by the queen’s badge to get their protection, or some notorious wicked man.’

* Munday would later pass off his play about Sir John Oldcastle as being by William Shakespeare. In Henry IV Part I, the character of Falstaff was originally called Sir John Oldcastle. This was changed when Oldcastle’s descendants complained about the slur on their ancestor’s name. In Act I.ii.40 Hal addresses Falstaff as ‘my old lad of the castle’.

† Cecil and Leicester, whose names also appear in the dedication to Munday’s book, do feature in this list. Cecil received a veiled compliment on his ‘wit’; of Leicester, Munday wrote that the comments made against him were ‘not here to be rehearsed’—a tactful remark under the circumstances.

* The Flagellants’ movement spread throughout Europe, reaching England in the fourteenth century. There, they were regarded with interest, though very few could be persuaded to join their numbers.

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