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

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      On 6 April 1580, while Persons and General Mercurian discussed the details of their forthcoming mission and Campion hurried from Prague to Rome to join them, an earthquake hit London and the southern counties of England. ‘The great clock bell in the palace at Westminster strake of itself against the hammer with the shaking of the earth.’ Stones tumbled from St Paul’s Cathedral. In Newgate an apprentice was killed by falling church masonry. Meanwhile, at Sandwich in Kent the sea ‘foamed…so that the ships tottered’ and at Dover ‘a piece of the cliff fell into the sea’.²⁸

      In the weeks and months that followed, strange visions appeared in the skies above Cornwall, Somerset and Wiltshire—ghostly castles and fleets of ships, three companies of men all dressed in black, a pack of hounds whose cry was so convincing it drew men from their houses in readiness for the chase. In Northumberland hailstones rained down in the shape of frogs, swords, crosses and, worse, the ‘skulls of dead men’. And in Yorkshire and Huntingdonshire strange births were reported, monstrous creatures part human, part beast, to signify ‘our monstrous life’, wrote Holinshed, who chronicled the year with a baleful gloom. The arrival of the Jesuits, like the arrival of the Spanish eight years later, was preceded by many ominous portents (not surprisingly, perhaps, when the prevailing view among William Allen’s circle was that ‘two Jesuits should do more than the whole army of Spain’).²⁹

      And with the coming of these portents, the fear that had haunted the nation throughout the preceding decade grew stronger still. A future war with Catholic Europe now seemed a foregone conclusion. It was really only a matter of when and, specifically, with whom that war would be fought. Would it be with the Pope, who was already sending invasion forces to Ireland? With the Spanish, who seemed invincible? Or, closer to home still, with Scotland? In 1578 the pro-English and Protestant Regent to the Scottish throne, the Earl of Morton, had been forced to resign. Now the country was ruled jointly by the Earl of Arran and Esmé Stuart, the boy-king James VI’s favourite cousin, both of whom were pro-Catholic, pro-Mary and, worst of all, pro-French. Wherever you looked as an Englishman in 1580, to all points of the compass and to the very skies above your head, there were signs to trouble the bravest of souls. And set beside these general fears of imminent conflict was the more specific fear that while eyes and minds had been otherwise distracted England’s Catholics had been growing stronger.³⁰

At the close of the 1570s the Spanish ambassador reported home to Philip II that ‘The number of Catholics, thank God, is daily increasing here [in England], owing to the college and seminary for Englishmen which your Majesty ordered to be supported in Douai.’ If this was designed to flatter, soon there were other reports flying backwards and forwards supporting the ambassador’s claim. Henry Shaw, one of Allen’s four proto-missionaries, wrote back to his mentor, ‘The number of Catholics increases so abundantly on all sides, that he who almost alone holds the rudder of state [Sir William Cecil?] had privately admitted to one of his friends that for one staunch Catholic at the beginning of the reign there were now, he knew for certain, ten.’ From Warwickshire the Earl of Leicester wrote to Sir William Cecil in alarm, to ‘assure your Lordship, since Queen Mary’s time, the Papists were never in that jollity they be at this present time in the country’. Meanwhile, the new Bishop of London, John Aylmer, warned Sir Francis Walsingham ‘that the Papists do marvellously increase, both in number and in obstinate withdrawing of themselves from the Church and service of God’.* A nationwide census of convicted recusants, drawn up in 1577, offered the shocking proof that there was not a diocese in England that did not contain a number of Catholics steadfastly refusing to attend the Anglican Church. And for every Catholic who openly defied the law, it was believed there were many more still who publicly conformed to the 1559 Settlement while attending Roman mass in secret.³¹

      It is difficult to know what to make of these reports. Offered in isolation, without other annual figures against which to compare them, there is little way of telling whether the Government’s 1577 findings show there to have been a significant growth in Catholic numbers, a change in Catholic behaviour (thanks to the influence of Allen’s missionaries), or simply (and most likely) an invigoration of the investigative process by which Catholics were being identified. Add to the mix a measure of Protestant paranoia and Catholic pride and it becomes still harder to get at the facts. But as the new decade dawned the widely held perception was that the number of practising—and thereby dissenting and potentially treacherous—Catholics had increased substantially. Here was a threat more specific and far closer to home than the potential invasion forces of Rome or Spain. And now, too, that threat could be personified. It had a name: a traitor and a turncoat’s name, the name of a former royal favourite and a courtier’s protégé, of the one-time ablest man in Oxford. As Privy Councillor Sir Walter Mildmay later testified in the Star Chamber, of all the ‘rabble of runagate friars’ there was ‘one above the rest notorious for impudency and audacity, named Campion’.³²

News of Edmund Campion’s arrival spread quickly through the Catholic community, the buzz that had surrounded his name up at Oxford undiminished by his many years abroad. On 29 June at the Feast of St Peter and St Paul, just three days after his appearance in London, a huge audience assembled at the Smithfield house of Lord Norris, hired for the occasion by Lord Paget, to hear him speak.* As a precaution, gentlemen ‘of worship and honour’, members of George Gilbert’s association, were set to guard the doors of the house against intruders, but no guard could halt the whispers now rippling through the busy London streets. It was not long before those same whispers had reached the ears of the Government’s informers.³³

      Soon spies were at work across the capital, detailed to ‘sigh after Catholic sermons and to show great devotion and desire of the same, especially if any of the Jesuits might be heard’. When Robert Persons returned from his preliminary tour of the country in early July he found Campion ‘retired for his more safety’ to Southwark and the situation a grave one, the searches ‘so eager and frequent…and the spies so many and diligent’. Clearly for Campion to remain longer in London was courting danger.³⁴

      But first the two priests had another problem to address, for it was not just the English Government that harboured suspicions about the Jesuits’ intentions. Some of England’s Catholics, too, though desirous to hear Campion and Persons preach, were less than happy to welcome the pair home for a prolonged stay. At a secret conference held in Southwark, near St Mary Overies (now Southwark Cathedral), Persons and Campion met with a panel of leading Catholic laymen and priests. Persons opened the meeting. He declared under oath that neither he nor Campion had been forewarned of the Pope’s Irish invasion—they had learned of the expedition only at Reims. Next, he read out the instructions for their mission, emphasizing that their orders strictly prohibited them from dabbling in ‘matters of state’. But his protestations failed to convince one of the attending priests, who now argued that the Catholics to whom he had spoken feared the Jesuits’ mission could only ever be viewed as political by the English Government. For the good of the faith, therefore, the pair should leave the country at once. Persons refused. The Jesuits had been expressly called to the mission. If they turned back now it would represent a decisive propaganda victory for Elizabeth and her Council. His argument won the day, but in the decades to come this conflict would become a full-scale and enervating war of attrition between the rival Catholic factions.³⁵

      The conference broke up not a moment too soon. Government agents were closing in on the venue. Charles Sledd, a former student at Rome who СКАЧАТЬ