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

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СКАЧАТЬ was at pains to stress the difficulties of living and working in disguise, of assuming and maintaining a false identity and of surviving alone without the support of the Society. He also pointed out the impossibility of retreat should the pressure grow too great. These hardships aside, their orders were clear. They were to work with those who were already favourable to the faith. They were to avoid all contact with the heretics. They were to ‘behave that all may see that the only gain they covet is that of souls’. They were not to entangle themselves ‘in affairs of State’, nor to send back political reports to Rome. They were not to speak against the Queen, except perhaps among those ‘whose fidelity has been long and steadfast and even then not without strong reasons’. And they were to carry with them nothing forbidden by English law: no papal bulls or Agnus Dei. This was a mission for ‘the preservation and augmentation of the Faith of the Catholics in England’ and it was not to be compromised by the amateurism that had tripped up Cuthbert Mayne.⁹

      Campion and Persons departed Rome on 18 April 1580, waved off in triumph by the entire English colony there. With them rode a party of some twelve other English Catholics, including a lay brother of the Society, Ralph Emerson, who would act as their servant in England, and a group of young seminary priests also on their way to join the mission. One witness, Robert Owen, a Welsh Catholic studying in Rome, wrote to his friend Dr Humphrey Ely at Reims, ‘This day depart hence many of our countrymen thitherward, and withal good Father Campion.’ Within days the letter had been intercepted by an English spy and its contents passed on to Sir Francis Walsingham in London. Edmund Campion was ‘on the way to my warfare in England’ and England was expecting him.¹⁰

      The party travelled on foot, using false names. Heavy rain dogged their passage through Italy. From Turin they climbed steadily upwards, crossing the Alps at Mont Cenis before descending again into the rich pastureland of the Savoy. From here they continued on to Lyons and on 31 May they came at last to the French university city of Reims.¹¹

But here some alarming news awaited them. Campion’s was not the only Catholic expedition to the British Isles that month. At the same time the Jesuit and his fellows had left Rome for England, five Spanish ships containing arms and men had left for Ireland. They sailed at the request of Campion’s Oxford contemporary Nicholas Sanders, now employed as a papal envoy. Their purpose was to assist the Irish rebel James Fitzmaurice unseat the ‘tyrant’ Elizabeth. And the man who had financed them was none other than Pope Gregory XIII.* Robert Persons noted his party’s reaction: ‘we were heartily sorry…because we plainly foresaw that this would be laid against us and other priests, if we should be taken in England, as though we had been privy or partakers thereof, as in very truth we were not, nor ever heard or suspected the same until this day’.¹²

Their situation grew still worse with the second piece of news that now reached them. English agents had provided the Privy Council with a full description of every member of the group and the Channel ports were being watched for their arrival. It was testimony to their courage that only one of the party, Thomas Goldwell, Bishop of St Asaph, now wavered. Goldwell took to his bed and began writing to the Pope to ask whether he was the best man for the job of supervising Allen’s missionaries. Indeed, he was not. He was seventy-nine years old, he had endured a gruelling journey from Rome and he was plainly terrified. His defection bore out William Allen’s belief that this was young man’s work. Allen himself remarked that ‘it was better the old man should yield to fear now than later on, on the other side’.† ¹³

      But while Goldwell panicked in Reims, his fellow travellers, joined by three students from William Allen’s Reims seminary, pressed on with their journey, splitting up into groups of twos and threes and separating to the French ports, in preparation for finding their way across the Channel. Edmund Campion, Robert Persons and the Jesuit lay brother Ralph Emerson made their way to St Omer, a short distance outside Calais. For them rather more than for their fellows, the Pope’s interference in Irish affairs had serious implications.

When Francis Drake sailed into Plymouth harbour on 26 September 1580 after successfully circumnavigating the globe, his ship laden to the gunwales with Spanish treasure, few doubted his success had just hammered another nail into the coffin of Anglo-Spanish relations. The grumblers were soon heard to complain that ‘just because two or three of the principal courtiers send ships out to plunder in this way, their property must be thus imperilled and their country ruined’.* In reality Drake’s actions and Elizabeth’s evident delight in them—she attended a celebratory banquet in honour of his voyage at which she instructed the French ambassador to dub Drake a knight, and she happily pocketed her own share of the profits—were little more than an irritant to Philip II. By 1580 Spain’s star was firmly in the ascendant. Decisive victories in the Netherlands by the Duke of Parma, Philip’s new commander there, and Philip’s surprise succession to the throne of Portugal had left Elizabeth commenting grimly, ‘It will be hard to withstand the King of Spain now.’† ¹⁴

      And whereas in the past England had relied on France to help maintain the precarious balance of European power, this was now impossible, no matter how much Elizabeth and the French Duc d’Alençon flirted and spoke of marriage all that year. For France had religious divisions of its own to contend with. In February 1580 the smouldering embers of Catholic-Protestant conflict had reignited once again and the country was now embroiled in its seventh War of Religion. So while France imploded, Philip was free to fix England within his sights without fear of opposition. As a good imperialist the prospect of invasion was tempting (particularly as he now also commanded the powerful Portuguese navy), but as a good Catholic his duty was clear to him. In 1578 Philip had instructed his ambassador to ‘endeavour to keep…[Elizabeth]…in a good humour and convinced of our friendship’. By 1580 he was openly backing the Irish rebel Fitzmaurice.¹⁵

      With European stability deteriorating rapidly and the Spanish threat increasing daily, Pius’s Bull Regnans was now more pertinent than ever. For if a good Catholic was, by definition, a bad Englishman, then the influx of the Douai missionaries alone—no matter the effect they were having on the populace as a whole—had certainly added to the number of good Catholics in England. And joining them now were the Jesuits, whose founder was no nice Oxford boy with an unfortunate weakness for the old religion, but an ascetically minded Spaniard. Worse still, the Jesuits pledged obedience directly to the Pope.

      Before leaving Rome Campion and Persons had been granted an audience with Pope Gregory. From him they had received a fresh clarification of the current position of Pius’s Bull in canon law to take with them to England. Gregory’s Explanatio declared it lawful for English Catholics to obey Elizabeth in civil matters while she was still de facto Queen and unlawful for them to depose her—but only for the time being. For while Pius had been sufficiently foolish to publish his Bull without giving a thought as to the enforcing of it, Gregory regarded himself as a more astute tactician. As soon as the political and military conditions were right, he explained, Pius’s Bull would be reactivated. He instructed Campion and Persons to deliver this ruling to England’s Catholics and with that he gave them his blessing. All Mercurian’s attempts to keep the religious aims of the Jesuits’ mission separate and distinct from the political machinations of Rome had been compromised at a single meeting.¹⁶

      So Campion, Persons and Emerson came to the Jesuit house at St Omer to consult with their superiors. Did General Mercurian wish their СКАЧАТЬ