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

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СКАЧАТЬ in 1530. And it was a Norfolk woman whose charms led to schism with Rome in the first place: Anne Boleyn was the daughter of the Norfolk squire Sir Thomas Boleyn and a niece of Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk. Later, when Anne’s daughter Elizabeth laid claim to being England’s most English of monarchs, the countrymen of Norfolk could nod their heads in agreement; after all, she was one of their own.¹⁴

      Yet when the Duke of Northumberland seized the English crown on behalf of his daughter-in-law Lady Jane Grey, it was to Norfolk that Mary Tudor fled to rally her supporters. Mary came to Kenninghall, west of Thetford, from where she wrote to the House of Lords on 9 July 1553 asserting her claim to the English throne. She was joined there by the loyal Norfolk gentry, all of them Catholic to a man. It was into the care of the Norfolk Catholic Sir Henry Bedingfeld that Mary entrusted her recalcitrant younger sister; Bedingfeld escorted Elizabeth from the Tower of London to house arrest at Woodstock in May 1554.* And it was of Norfolk that a Spanish agent wrote in 1586, as Philip II scouted for suitable landing sites for his Armada fleet, ‘the majority of the people are attached to the Catholic religion’. If England was a country still divided by religion then the county of Norfolk was England in microcosm. And few families illustrated this divided country and county better than the Yelvertons, to whom John Gerard now returned.¹⁵

      Edward Yelverton, Gerard’s Catholic contact from Norwich Cathedral, was the eldest son from the second marriage of William Yelverton of Rougham, Norfolk. On his father’s death Edward inherited the family’s estate at Grimston, extending well over two thousand acres. There he lived with his family, his younger brother Charles, a committed Protestant, and his newly widowed half-sister Jane Lumner, viewed by Gerard as ‘a rabid Calvinist’. (Gerard also mentions a half-brother, Sir Christopher Yelverton, who was ‘one of the leaders of the Calvinist party in England’.) It was a dangerous place for Gerard to begin his mission, despite Edward Yelverton’s keenness for Grimston to become a Jesuit base. Such religious differences as divided the Yelvertons could stretch family loyalty to breaking point, as a contemporary poem revealed:

      …your husbands do procure your care [imprisonment],

      And parents do renounce you to be theirs; …your wives do bring your life in snare, And brethren false affright you full of fears; And…your children seek to have your end, In hope your goods with thriftless mates to spend.¹⁶

      In years to come many Catholics would learn that their nearest was all too often their dearest enemy, particularly when an inheritance was at stake. Gerard, himself, had already experienced the Yelverton family’s mistrust. ‘On my first arrival [at Grimston]’, he wrote, ‘the Protestant brother was indeed suspicious—for I was a stranger, I had come here in company with his Catholic brother, and he could think of no reason why his brother treated me so kindly.’ The priest’s easy familiarity with the occupations of an Elizabethan country gentleman had soon allayed Charles Yelverton’s fears: ‘When I got the opportunity I spoke about hunting and falconry, a thing no one could do in correct language unless he was familiar with the sports.’ Freshly equipped as ‘a gentleman of moderate means’—in clothes provided by Henry Garnet, who ‘was anxious that I should not be a burden to my host at the start’—Gerard now took up his role of sporting squire once more.¹⁷

      The methodology of the Catholic mission to England had changed little since William Allen’s seminary priests first began arriving home in 1574. The protomartyr Cuthbert Mayne had clothed himself as the Tregian family’s steward; Robert Persons as a returning soldier of fortune—the key to a missionary’s success or failure lay in his ability to inhabit his new identity fully. This was best evinced by Father Richard Blount, who returned to England in the spring of 1591 disguised as a homecoming prisoner-of-war. Blount was interviewed by Admiral Lord Howard of Effingham and provided him with enough information—all fabricated—about the deployment of the Spanish fleet to earn himself a naval pension in recompense, or so Blount’s friends reported afterwards.¹⁸

      In his play The Taming of the Shrew, written c.1592, Shakespeare introduced ‘a young scholar that hath been long studying at Rheims…cunning in Greek, Latin and other languages’. The role was cover for the amorous suitor Lucentio, enabling him to woo the ‘fair Bianca’. But among the audience watching the new comedy, there would have been those who recognized in Shakespeare’s words an allusion to an altogether different form of deception. The young Reims scholars they knew, seminary students fresh from their lessons in Greek, Latin, Hebrew and English, were even now being deployed across the country disguised as tutors, stewards and visiting poor relations.* John Gerard was now Mr Robert Thompson, ‘attired [according to a later spy’s report] costly and defensibly in buff leather, garnished with gold or silver lace, satin doublets, and velvet hose of all colours with cloaks correspondent, and rapiers and daggers gilt or silvered’. ‘It was thus’, wrote Gerard, ‘that I used to go about before I was a Jesuit and I was therefore more at ease in these clothes than I would have been if I had assumed a role that was strange and unfamiliar to me…[Now] I could stay longer and more securely in any house or noble home where my host might bring me as his friend or acquaintance.’ More importantly, now he could ‘meet many Protestant gentlemen’ and bring ‘them slowly back to a love of the [Catholic] faith’.¹⁹

      There exists a memorandum dated 1583, written by George Gilbert, leader of the band of young Catholics who had assisted Campion and Persons during the first Jesuit mission to England. It is called A way to deal with persons of all sorts as to convert them and bring them back to a better way of life—based on the system and methods used by Fr. Robert Persons and Fr. Edmund Campion and, as its title suggests, it is a proselytizer’s handbook. Gilbert was ideally placed to advise the new missionaries. It had been his money and his connection with most of the major Catholic families in England that had enabled Campion and Persons to travel the country in relative safety, setting up their network. And until his escape to France in 1581 (at Persons’ entreaty), Gilbert had been adept at cheating capture. Arrested and brought before the Bishop of London in midsummer 1580, he was quickly released when Norris, the bishop’s pursuivant, attested to his honesty; Norris was said to be in Gilbert’s pay. This memorandum was Gilbert’s last contribution to the English Catholic cause—he died in Rome on 6 October 1583 aged just thirty-one, having been admitted into the Society of Jesus on his deathbed. But it was Gilbert’s instructions that John Gerard now followed as he began his Norfolk apostolate.²⁰

      ‘As soon as any father or learned priest has entered an heretical country’, wrote Gilbert,

      ‘he should seek out some gentleman to be his companion. This man should be zealous, loyal, discreet and determined to help him in this service of God, and should be able to undertake honourably the expenses of both of them. He should have a first-rate reputation as a good comrade and as being knowledgeable about the country, the roads and paths, the habits and disposition of the gentry and people of the place, and should be a man who has many relations and friends and much local information.’

      In Edward Yelverton, Gerard had found just such a companion. This primary contact made, the newly arrived priest could then ‘mix freely everywhere, both in public and in private, dressed as a gentleman and with various kinds of get-up and disguises so as to be better able to have intercourse with people without arousing suspicion’. And so it proved for Gerard: ‘I stayed openly six or eight months in the house of that gentleman who was my first host. During that time he introduced me to the house and circle of nearly every gentleman in Norfolk, and before the end of the eight months I had received many people into the Church.’СКАЧАТЬ