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

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СКАЧАТЬ on safely? The discussions were tinged with doubt and anxiety but finally an agreement was reached: the mission would proceed as planned. They had all come far too far to stop now. Persons later wrote, ‘as we could not remedy the matters, and as our consciences were clear, we resolved through evil report or good report to go on with the purely spiritual action we had in hand; and if God destined any of us to suffer under a wrong title, it was only what he had done, and would be no loss’. Behind the bravado, though, lay a very real appreciation of the increased perils now facing them.¹⁷

      The decision made, Campion, Persons and Emerson were directed to the house of George Chamberlain, an English Catholic living in exile in France. There, they were equipped with new disguises for their onward journey and some time after midnight on 16 June 1580, dressed in a buff leather coat with gold lace trim and a feathered hat, ‘under the habit and profession of a captain returned from the Low Countries’, Robert Persons made the short sea voyage from Calais to Dover. The mission was begun.¹⁸

      Close surveillance was being kept on the English seaports. When Persons arrived at Dover on the morning of 17 June he was brought before the port authorities and cross-examined. His cover story and performance held up under the scrutiny. Many Englishmen looking for adventure had gone abroad to fight for the Dutch rebels and Persons had taken to his role with ease—Campion described him to Mercurian as ‘such a peacock, such a swaggerer, that a man needs must have very sharp eyes to catch a glimpse of any holiness and modesty shrouded beneath such a garb’—and so, after thorough interrogation, the Dover customs ‘found no cause of doubt in him, but let him pass with all favour, procuring him both a horse and all other things necessary for his journey’. One official proved sufficiently friendly for Persons to seize the initiative. He asked the man if he would forward a letter to his friend, a Mr Edmunds in St Omer, telling the ‘jewel merchant’ to come quickly to London where he would be met. And he asked the official to be sure to look out for his friend when he landed and see him safely on his journey. The letter was duly sent to the waiting Edmund Campion.¹⁹

      From Dover, Persons rode north to Gravesend, arriving at nightfall. Here his luck continued. He boarded a waiting boat that took him upriver to London, depositing him at Southwark, on the south bank of the Thames, before dawn on the morning of 18 June. He had been on the move less than thirty-six hours.

But now his good fortune ran out. As Robert Persons came ashore in England’s waking capital he found that ‘the greatest danger of all seemed to be in London itself’. His immediate problem was that he could find nowhere to take him in, ‘by reason of the new proclamations and rumours against suspicious people that were to come’ from abroad. Every ‘inn where he went seemed to be afraid to receive him, and so much the more for that they might guess by the fashion of his apparel that he was come from beyond the seas’. His mercenary’s disguise had begun to work against him and for all the careful planning and for all that Allen’s seminary priests had been returning to England for the past six years, there was still no system in place to help a new arrival make contact with anyone prepared to assist him. Persons spent a bleak few hours walking the streets of the city. Finally, he ‘resolved to adventure into the prison of the Marshalsea and to ask for a gentleman prisoner there named Mr Thomas Pound’, a former courtier turned devout Catholic.* ²⁰

      Since the 1570s the number of Catholics arrested for attending secret mass had increased steadily, so if you wished to meet an open and unrepentant papist there was always one place you were guaranteed to find one—prison. And though convicts were held at Her Majesty’s pleasure, the ever parsimonious Elizabeth did not consider them her guests. Prisoners were expected to supply their own food and drink and their own beds and bedding, the latter to be donated to the gaoler at the end of their sentence. Wealthy prisoners prepared to pay for the privilege might entertain visitors, conduct business and even go out from time to time, so long as sufficient amounts of money changed hands.

      Thomas Pound was delighted to receive his new guest. He introduced Persons to a young man named Edward Brookesby who also happened to be visiting the prison that day and soon Persons was following Brookesby to a house on Fetter or Chancery Lane. The Jesuit’s luck had returned.²¹

      Secrecy surrounded this house in the city. It was said to have belonged to Adam Squire, the Bishop of London’s son-in-law and London’s chief pursuivant, but by 1580 it had become the rented headquarters of a group of ‘young gentlemen of great zeal’, each one dedicated ‘to advance and assist the setting forward of God’s cause and religion…every man offering himself, his person, his ability, his friends, and whatsoever God had lent him besides, to the service of the cause’. This band of enthusiastic young Catholics (of which Edward Brooksby was one) was led by George Gilbert, a man already known to Robert Persons.²²

Gilbert was a twenty-eight-year-old Suffolk man of enormous independent wealth, an accomplished athlete, horseman and swordsman.* He had been raised a strict Puritan but in Paris, where he had proved a great favourite at the French court, he had come under the spell of Catholicism. From Paris he travelled to Rome where, with religious instruction from Robert Persons, his confessor at St Peter’s Basilica, Gilbert converted to the old faith. On his return to England in 1579 he began to gather about him a group of like-minded and equally wealthy young Englishmen, ready to devote their energies ‘to the common support of Catholics’. Charles Arundel, Charles Basset (a descendant of Sir Thomas More), Edward Habington, Edward and Francis Throckmorton, Anthony Babington, Henry Vaux, William Tresham and John Stonor: all would give time and money to further the Catholic cause; several would give their lives. To what degree they had already begun working together as a secret society is the subject of dispute, but with Robert Persons’ arrival in London their enthusiasm now found new focus.²³

      Once settled in George Gilbert’s city headquarters, Persons began ‘to acquire a number of friends and to arrange with inns, with a view to staying in the country for a few days’. Then, with Gilbert’s aid and an escort to accompany him, Persons left London to ‘employ himself in the best manner he could to the comfort of Catholics’.²⁴

      Meanwhile, in St Omer, Edmund Campion had received Persons’ letter and was preparing for his own crossing to England. On the evening of 24 June the summer storms that had battered the Channel coastline for days finally let up and the waiting was over. Disguised as Persons’ jewel merchant friend and with Ralph Emerson acting as his servant, Edmund Campion set sail from Calais.²⁵

      At daybreak the following morning the port of Dover stood at red alert. Word had reached the Council that Gabriel Allen, William Allen’s brother, was returning to England to visit his family in Lancashire. Edmund Campion bore more than a passing resemblance to the wanted man. Campion and Emerson were dragged before the Mayor of Dover, cross-examined, then informed they were to be sent to London for further questioning. Then, for no obvious reason, the mayor changed his mind. Quickly, the two men left Dover, riding north to the Thames estuary before boarding a boat that took them upriver to the capital.²⁶

      Reaching London, they were still in some doubt as to what they should do next. Then a man detached himself from the waiting crowd at the quayside and stepped forward to greet them, saying, ‘Mr Edmunds, give me your hand; I stay here for you to lead you to your friends.’ The man’s name was Thomas James. He was a member of George Gilbert’s brotherhood of young Catholics and for СКАЧАТЬ