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

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       Four

      ‘Campion is a champion, Him once to overcome,

      The rest be well dressed The sooner to mum.’

       (Sixteenth century ballad)

DURING THE STATE VISIT to Oxford of 1566, before a packed house of royal dignitaries and university academics, Edmund Campion had impressed the young Queen Elizabeth with his skill at debating. Elizabeth, who admired a keen intellect every bit as much as the ability to hunt or dance, was delighted by Campion and the plaudits followed thick and fast. ‘Ask what you like for the present’, promised Oxford’s Chancellor and Elizabeth’s favourite, the Earl of Leicester; ‘the Queen and I will provide for the future.’* At the age of twenty-six this son of a London bookseller had England at his feet.¹

      But Campion had taken a very different path from the one mapped out for him by the Queen and her courtiers. After his ordination into the Anglican Church in 1568 he had reportedly experienced great anguish of conscience. That same year it had been brought to the notice of the Grocers’ Company of London, from whom he held an exhibition scholarship, that he was ‘suspected to be of unsound judgement’ in religion. The guild ordered him to ‘come and preach at Paul’s Cross, in London’ so they might ‘clear the suspicions conceived of [him]’ and, more importantly, so he might ‘alter his mind in favouring the religion now authorised’. Otherwise, they added warningly, ‘the Company’s exhibition shall cease’. Campion declined their invitation and lost his scholarship. In 1569 he left Oxford for the more congenial—and more Catholic—shores of Ireland and in the summer of 1572 the man regarded by Sir William Cecil as ‘one of the diamonds of England’, with his own devoted group of followers known as Campionists, the man with an established reputation as a scholar and writer and an assured position in the hierarchy of the new English Church, threw it all away and sailed for Douai. ‘It is a very great pity to see so notable a man leave his country,’ wrote Cecil.²

At Douai, under the instruction of William Allen, Campion became a Catholic priest and in Rome, to which he travelled following his ordination, he joined the Society of Jesus.* The long and painful struggle with his conscience was over. In March 1580, eight years after his flight to the Continent, he was summoned back to England.³

      Up to now the Jesuits had not involved themselves in the English mission. They were, though, ideally suited to the task. If William Allen’s students were the ordinary foot soldiers in Rome’s army of arguers then Ignatius Loyola’s Jesuits were the special forces, physically toughened by strict, self-imposed hardships and vows of poverty, mentally strengthened by long periods of solitude and meditation, and well aware that education was the strongest weapon in the proselytizer’s armoury. ‘Give me a boy at the age of seven, and he will be mine for ever,’ declared Loyola. Within a decade of their formation the Jesuits had established colleges throughout Catholic Europe and were ranging as far afield as Mexico and Japan, the front lines of Christian conflict. Their startling success aroused fear among Protestants and resentment among their fellow Catholics. But to Loyola’s men this was holy war and in warfare the end justified the means.⁴

Having already lost many of his finest students, including Campion, to the elite new order, it was William Allen, always on the lookout for new ways to help England’s beleaguered Catholics, who suggested the Jesuits widen their range of operations to include the English mission. Why sacrifice the lives of English priests in far-flung corners of the world when there was ample work for them to do in their own homeland? First, though, he had to persuade the unwilling Jesuit General, Everard Mercurian, that England was worth the venture.* ⁵

      Mercurian’s reluctance to send his men to England was deeprooted. He declared the Society already over-committed in other parts of the world. He ‘found divers difficulties…about their manner of living there [in England] in secular men’s houses in secular apparel…as how also their rules and orders for conservation of religious spirit might there be observed’. But most of all, he argued, as conditions in England now stood it would be impossible for his missionaries to maintain the kind of order, discipline and apoliticism in the line of fire on which the effectiveness of their work depended. How could he send his men into a political minefield like England and expect them to minister to Catholics while, at the same time, dodging the accusations of intrigue and treachery that would inevitably be hurled their way? And how could he ask them to do so in isolation, deprived of the support of their fellow Jesuits? Gradually, as the 1570s drew to a close, William Allen wore him down. He was helped in this by a fellow Oxford graduate and a Jesuit of some five years’ standing, Robert Persons.⁶

      Robert Persons was a ‘fierce natured’, ‘impudent’ West Countryman, born at Nether Stowey in Somerset in 1546. In 1564, at the age of eighteen, he went up to Oxford, where he discovered Catholicism, first as a student at St Mary’s Hall, Allen’s old college, and then as a fellow of Balliol. By 1573, his new allegiance to the old faith had brought him to the attention of the authorities and his abrasive manner had offended sufficient of his colleagues and he was summarily expelled, ‘even with the public ringing of bells’. So Robert Persons took passage to the Continent. Once there he enrolled to study medicine at the University of Padua, but a chance meeting with a member of the Jesuits made a profound impression on the twenty-seven-year-old. After two years pursuing his medical studies, Robert Persons packed his bags and walked to Rome. On 25 June 1575 he joined the Society of Jesus, a day after his twenty-ninth birthday.⁷

      Four years later Persons was writing privately to William Allen that among the English Jesuits there were ‘divers to adventure their blood in that mission [to England], among whom I put myself as one’. Faced with such zeal Mercurian finally gave way. A first Jesuit mission to England was ordered; Robert Persons was named as its commander and Edmund Campion was selected to accompany him. ‘The expense is reckoned,’ wrote Campion, ‘the enterprise is begun. It is of God, it cannot be withstood.’⁸

      From Prague, where he was teaching Rhetoric at the university, Campion СКАЧАТЬ