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

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СКАЧАТЬ of law student and known Catholic, Henry Orton, Persons’ guide on his earlier tour of the country, now travelling to Southwark to take part in the secret meeting. Sledd fell into step behind him, but before Orton could reach his destination Sledd had him apprehended. When, just a short while later, Sledd spotted the elderly Marian priest Robert Johnson making the same journey to Southwark, the informer’s suspicions were aroused. Once again Campion and Persons had a lucky escape. Sledd’s constable, growing impatient of the hunt, broke cover too soon and arrested Johnson some distance short of the meeting house. The time had come for the two Jesuits to leave London for the comparative safety of the open road.³⁶

      Each equipped with a pair of horses, a servant, travelling clothes suitable for a gentleman and sixty pounds of spending money—all provided by George Gilbert, who accompanied them on the first leg of their journey—Campion and Persons headed north out of the city to Hoxton, where they spent the night, possibly at the house of Sir William Catesby, a landowner with Catholic sympathies. The following morning they were surprised by Thomas Pound, who had successfully bribed his way out of the Marshalsea prison and had ridden through the night to intercept them. The prisoners had been talking among themselves, said Pound. If Campion or Persons were captured it would be an easy matter for the Government to paint them as traitors and political agitators. They must each, therefore, set down a declaration of their aims and the precise purpose of their mission, which Pound would safeguard for them. It seemed a sensible idea and the two Jesuits duly wrote out their statements, handing them to the waiting Pound before heading on their way. Persons sealed his paper; Campion left his open: a small character distinction that would have huge repercussions.³⁷

      Back in the Marshalsea, Pound read Campion’s document. He showed it to his fellow prisoners. Soon, copies of the text were circulating through the gaol, smuggled from cell to cell. Visitors to the prison carried transcripts away with them. The pages fanned out across London and to the countryside beyond, landing indiscriminately in the hands of friend and foe. Campion’s testimony, intended as a defence of his case only in the event of his arrest, was now blowing through England like a campaign manifesto.³⁸

      Campion addressed the Privy Council directly and in measured tones at first. His return home to his ‘dear Country’ was ‘for the glory of God and the benefit of souls’. He was ‘strictly forbidden by our Father that sent me, to deal in any respect with matter of State or Policy of this realm’. He begged for a chance to defend the Catholic faith before the Privy Council and an assembly of judges and theologians, so certain was he that no one could fail to be persuaded of the rightness of his argument if they would only give him an ‘indifferent and quiet audience’. But then, in a flourish of rhetoric familiar from his Oxford days, Campion laid down a challenge that horrified his Protestant readers: ‘be it known to you that we have made a league—all the Jesuits in the world…—cheerfully to carry the cross you shall lay upon us, and never to despair your recovery, while we have a man left to enjoy your Tyburn’. Even now, gathered beyond the seas, were ‘many innocent hands’, all of whom were ‘determined never to give you over, but either to win you to heaven, or to die upon your pikes’. To Catholics it was a blast of hope. To Protestants, and to Elizabeth’s Government in particular, it was a war cry. If Campion had been a wanted man before, now he had become the official spokesman of the Catholic mission and a voice to be silenced at all costs.³⁹

The immediate aim of the Jesuits’ mission, highlighted by the awkward few hours spent by Persons on his arrival searching for a Catholic contact to aid him, was to bring order to the local efforts of Allen’s seminary missionaries. Successful the seminary priests had undoubtedly been, but their successes were isolated. What was required was a coherent, national scheme, providing a country-wide network of priests capable of administering to all England’s Catholics. Secondary to this aim was the need to ensure a regular supply of students to the Reims and Rome seminaries. This latter objective could be dealt with straightforwardly. It was arranged for a Father William Hartley and a Father Arthur Pitts to take up discreet residence at Oxford and Cambridge respectively, to search out and approach likely recruits for the mission. Hartley’s job was the easier—Oxford students were still proving highly ‘responsive to the ancient faith’, even by 1580.* Pitts, though, had his work cut out for him. Cambridge’s proximity to the trading routes of the East Coast, along which Protestant theories had first flooded into England, meant that the country’s second university was never as defiantly pro-Catholic as the more isolated Oxford. Nevertheless, a number of students were still eager to listen to Pitts’ arguments and ‘within a few months he gained a harvest of seven young men of very great promise and talent, and now they are on the point of being sent to the Seminary at Rheims’, reported Persons afterwards. More would soon follow.* ⁴⁰

      But to achieve their primary objective Campion and Persons needed to travel—to divide up the country between them and cover it, county by county. Their first tour of duty lasted three months, with Persons taking in Gloucester, Hereford, Worcester and on through to Derbyshire, and Campion visiting Berkshire, Oxfordshire and Northamptonshire. A second round of journeying found Persons moving in and about the London area, and Campion going north for six months, up to Lancashire and Yorkshire.⁴¹

      With the travelling, though, came all the pressures of isolation and nervous exhaustion that General Everard Mercurian had warned them of back in Rome. ‘I cannot long escape the hands of the heretics,’ wrote Campion; ‘the enemy have so many eyes, so many tongues, so many scouts and crafts.’ He was forced to switch disguises continuously to keep ahead of the pursuivants, but still this offered him little sense of security: ‘My soul is in mine own hands ever.’ And as fast as the pursuivants chased him so the rumour mills turned: ‘I read letters sometimes myself that in the first front tell news that Campion is taken, which, noised in every place where I come, so filleth my ears with the sound thereof, that fear itself hath taken away all fear.’ Persons wrote simply: ‘We never have a single day free from danger.’⁴²

      As the manhunt intensified so too did the means used to flush the two Jesuits from their hiding places. Campion informed Mercurian ‘at the very writing hereof, the persecution rages most cruelly. The house where I am is sad; no other talk but of death, flight, prison, or spoil of their friends’. Persons wrote: ‘the violence …is most intense and it is of a kind that has not been heard of since the conversion of England. Everywhere there are being dragged to prison, noblemen and those of humble birth, men, women and even children’. He described sitting at table when ‘there comes a hurried knock at the door, like that of a pursuivant; all start up and listen,—like deer when they hear the huntsmen; we leave our food and commend ourselves to God…If it is nothing, we laugh at our fright’. Too often, though, it proved not to be nothing. Ralph Sherwin, a young seminarian and former Oxford student who had accompanied the two Jesuits on their journey from Rome, was arrested on 13 November, preaching at the house of Mr Roscarock just twenty-four hours after he had been with Persons. Edward Rishton, another former Oxford undergraduate and one of the first English students at Allen’s Douai seminary, was captured during a raid at the Red Rose Tavern in Holborn. Persons was expected at the inn, but he had lost his way en route and only arrived when the search was over.⁴³

      On 16 January 1581 Parliament met to consider the Jesuit peril. Unsurprisingly, Sir Walter Mildmay’s opening speech was full of invective against the newly arrived priests in particular and the Catholic population in general. The Jesuits crept ‘into the houses and familiarities of men of behaviour and reputation…to corrupt the realm with false doctrine’, and ‘to stir sedition’. Meanwhile, СКАЧАТЬ