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

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СКАЧАТЬ had been privy to foreign invasion plans—they, themselves, were the advance party for that invasion, sent to stir up rebellion. It is unclear why the original indictment, which invoked Parliament’s new Treason Act, was dropped in favour of these accusations. Perhaps Elizabeth’s reluctance to make martyrs had something to do with it—political enemies of England deserved execution, but so many priests dying solely for their faith smacked strongly of religious persecution for its own sake. More likely, though, it was a calculated attempt by the Government to turn what might have become an intellectual argument about the lawfulness of the Anglican Church—in which Campion might have triumphed—into an emotive debate about national security. Either way, the Council dropped what would have been a legal, if unpopular, arraignment on the grounds of converting the Queen’s subjects to Catholicism, in favour of these trumped-up charges of mass conspiracy to murder.* It was entirely in keeping with the paranoia of the age.⁵⁴

Also in keeping was the procession of shady characters brought out to testify against the accused. The informant Charles Sledd swore that while in Rome and in Reims he had learned of the invasion plans from William Allen and one of the prisoners, Luke Kirby. George Eliot claimed that Campion, in his Lyford sermon, had spoken of ‘a great day’ that was soon to come, and that another of the prisoners had sworn him to secrecy about the plot. And the arch-fabricator Anthony Munday was brought in to announce to a packed courtroom that the English seminary students were schooled in treason, that Henry Orton had told him at Lyons that Elizabeth was not the rightful Queen of England—Orton vehemently denied ever having set eyes on Munday before—and that Edward Rishton was a skilled maker of fireworks who was planning to burn Elizabeth in her royal barge with ‘a confection of wild fire’, an event to be followed by a general massacre of all those not in possession of the password ‘Jesus Maria’.† The verdict was a foregone conclusion.⁵⁵

      Campion had always believed he was coming home to England to die. The night before his departure from Prague a colleague had inscribed on the door above his cell P. Edmundus Campianus, Martyr. Earlier, another priest had painted a garland of roses and lilies on the wall above his bed—the symbol of martyrdom. On the morning of 1 December 1581 Campion was led out from the Tower, through the driving rain and the mud-choked London streets, to the scaffold at Tyburn. There he was hanged, drawn and quartered before the assembled crowds. With him were Father Alexander Briant, a close friend of Robert Persons, and Father Ralph Sherwin, the young seminarian who had set off from Rome with Campion and Persons in such high spirits the year before.⁵⁶

      In May the following year seven more priests were executed, including Thomas Ford, Luke Kirby, Robert Johnson and William Filby. Edward Rishton and the layman Henry Orton, though both found guilty of treason and sentenced to death, were not executed. They were kept prisoner in the Tower until January 1585 when they were forcibly deported to France. Father John Collington was able to find a witness to confirm he had been resident in England since July 1576 and therefore could not have been in Reims and Rome on the dates specified. Like Orton and Rishton he was exiled to France in January 1585, having spent the intervening years in the comparative comfort of the Marshalsea prison.

      After Campion’s execution the lay brother Ralph Emerson escaped from England and made his way safely to Rouen. He joined in exile George Gilbert, the Jesuits’ friend, guide and self-appointed financier, whose activities had placed him in grave danger of arrest and who had been persuaded to leave England shortly before Campion’s capture. As for Robert Persons, with Campion’s arrest the Government now turned its attention wholly on him. Clearly, he could not elude the pursuivants for long and in August he made his way to France, disguised as one of a number of Catholic refugees fleeing persecution. He would never see England again.⁵⁷

      The savagery of Campion’s death had taken people’s breath away. It was not just that he had been tortured while in the Tower—so severe were the bouts of racking he endured that when his keeper asked him how he felt, he allegedly answered ‘Not ill, because not at all’; witnesses to his trial reported he was unable to raise his hand to take the oath and witnesses to his execution reported ‘that all his nails had been dragged out’. It was not just that so many had been executed with him—since Cuthbert Mayne’s execution in 1577, only two other priests and one scholar had suffered the same fate. It was more the realization that the Government had turned against one of its own, and such a one as the scholar Campion, that shocked onlookers.⁵⁸

      Some felt Elizabeth had sacrificed Campion as a sop to those Puritans concerned by her proposal to wed the Catholic Duc d’Alençon. Others, that Campion had been silenced by a Government unable to defend its new faith against the theological reasoning of the Catholic Church. Ballad-mongers were soon singing:

      If instead of good argument,

      We deal by the rack, The Papists may think That learning we lack.

      Many were even more direct in their criticisms:

      Our preachers have preached in pastime and pleasure,

      And now they be hated far passing all measure; Their wives and their wealth have made them so mute, They cannot nor dare not with Campion dispute.

      What was clear to all, though, was that with Campion’s death, the Jesuit mission to England had been stopped in its tracks. The question was, could it ever regain its momentum?⁵⁹

      Seven years later, in October 1588, Father John Gerard was setting out to answer this question. Campion had written of a ‘league’ of ‘all the Jesuits in the world’—a league dedicated to restoring England to the Catholic Church, no matter how brutal the cost. For Gerard the time had come to make good that promise.

* Campion is reported to have asked for nothing but Leicester’s friendship.

* Campion chose to walk from Douai to Rome as a poor pilgrim. On the way he was met by an Oxford contemporary who at first failed to recognize him and then assumed he had been robbed. When he learned it was voluntary mortification he dismissed the idea as un-English and fit only for a crazed fanatic, and he offered Campion a share of his purse. Campion refused.

* Ignatius Loyola died in 1556.

* Gregory’s attitude towards Elizabeth is controversial. In 1580 his Secretary of State gave the following answer to an enquiry by a group of English noblemen as to whether or not they would incur sin by assassinating the Queen: ‘Since that guilty woman of England rules over two such noble kingdoms of Christendom and is the cause of so much injury to the Catholic faith, and loss of so many million souls, there is no doubt that whosoever sends her out of the world with the pious intention of doing service, not only does not sin but gains merit’. This judgement came with Gregory’s approval. The logic behind it was clear: Elizabeth was a heretic; her actions imperilled the souls of her subjects; her killing was expedient (to cite ‘thou shalt not kill’ in objection ignores the fact that the Church was already busy burning heretics). But to extrapolate from this that the Vatican officially sanctioned the murder of its opponents is wide of the mark; indeed, Gregory’s approval of the English noblemen’s scheme had a hugger-mugger air to it, admission that Elizabeth’s assassination was against the spirit, if not the letter, of contemporary moral reasoning. СКАЧАТЬ