God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests & the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot
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But some of the paranoia was justified. On the feast of Candlemas, 2 February 1579, a former stationer’s apprentice, Anthony Munday, and his friend Thomas Nowell arrived at the newly formed English College in Rome. Since William Allen’s visit to the city four years earlier, the plans to open a seminary on the site of the old English pilgrim’s hostel had come on apace. By the time of Munday’s visit the college already held forty-two students, including the young Robert Southwell.23
Munday and Nowell were offered eight days’ entertainment at the college, ‘which by the Pope was granted to such Englishmen as come thither’. For Munday the invitation was followed by an awkward encounter. Earlier in his adventures he had been mistaken by a group of young Englishmen in Paris for the son of a prominent Catholic gentleman. This had afforded him a warm welcome and a number of letters of introduction to Rome so Munday had done nothing to disabuse his new friends of their notion. But now in Rome he was greeted by a priest who knew this Catholic gentleman well. Munday spent an uncomfortable evening parrying questions and ‘was put to so hard a shift that I knew not well what to say’. When the supper-bell rang he fled with relief and thereafter did his best to avoid his interrogator.24
In the days that followed Munday had ample time to record in detail his impressions of seminary life, from morning study and prayers, through the daily tuition in divinity, logic and rhetoric, to the student chatter around the fireside at night. But Anthony Munday was a Protestant. In time he would become a professional informer.
Munday’s diary of his stay in Rome is the first recorded memoir written by a spy. It must, however, be read with a certain scepticism: his target audience was a paying public eager to believe the worst about the seminary, and his literary credibility is dubious.* Moreover, his claims are suspicious. The students, he wrote, competed amongst themselves as to ‘who shall speak worst of her Majesty’, while their teachers were as insulting about her ministers: Francis Bacon appears as ‘the Butcher’s son, the great guts, oh he would fry well with a Faggot’; Ambrose Dudley becomes ‘a good fat whoreson, to make Bacon of’. (Significantly, Sir Thomas Bromley, to whom Munday dedicated the work, does not feature in this list of gibes.† ) And somewhat at odds with the ill-concealed relish of Munday’s descriptions is his politic disclaimer that all these ministers were, of course, ‘honourable personages, to whom the words do offer great abuse, and whom I unfeignedly reverence and honour’.25
But if much of Munday’s account reads like the work of an entertaining profiteer looking to sell a few books at the Government’s expense, certain facts in his story do ring true, particularly when viewed in conjunction with William Allen’s syllabus at Douai and Reims. Each mealtime the students listened to readings from the Bible to arm them for the fight against heresy. They took part in daily disputations to sharpen their skills in debate. And encouraged by Allen, who explained that ‘We must needs confess that all these things have come upon our country through our sins’, they undertook public penance for the most minor infringement of the college rules. Munday, who in his brief stay ‘was always apt to break one order or other’, wrote with feeling about these penances. But it was his description of the students’ self-flagellation that was most arresting. The penitent student entered the dining room dressed in a long canvas robe with a hole cut in its back, hooded to hide his identity and carrying a short-handled whip with ‘forty or fifty cords at it, about the length of half a yard: with a great many hard knots on every cord, and some of the whips have through every knot at the end crooked wires, which will tear the flesh unmercifully’. The student then walked up and down the room, whipping his back until the blood ran. Scourging was familiar among monastic orders as a means of discipline and it was still the recognized punishment for any priest found guilty of the disparate crimes of blasphemy, concubinage and simony (the selling of ecclesiastical privileges). Self-scourging was popular among the more ascetic orders as a means of mortification. But the picture Munday paints is reminiscent of the Flagellants, the fanatical sect that sprang up out of the plague-stricken thirteenth century and who whipped themselves until they bled in reparation for the sins of the world.* Allen’s holy warriors, it seemed, were taking upon themselves the sins of the English nation.26
Munday’s intrusion into life at the English College in Rome suggested Allen’s missionaries-in-training could not long remain isolated from the outside world. Allen’s own behaviour, however, had made a collision between priests and government spies inevitable. For in an age of high intrigue, William Allen was fast becoming an arch-intriguer.
On his journey to Rome in 1575 Allen coupled talks on the foundation of the new seminary with detailed discussions about a forthcoming Spanish-backed invasion of England; he only came away from the Holy City when it was felt his ‘prolonged stay [there] might arouse suspicion in that woman [Elizabeth]’. He was also in contact with the imprisoned Mary, Queen of Scots, recommending a trustworthy courier as her go-between with the outside world. And his regular correspondence with New College exile Nicholas Sanders reveals the extent to which these two Oxford graduates now valued their influence in the murky world of European affairs. Sanders wrote to Allen
‘We shall have no steady comfort but from God, in the A [the Pope] not the X [Philip II]. Therefore I beseech you to take hold of A, for X is as fearful of war as a child is of fire, and all his endeavour is to avoid all such occasions. The A will give two thousand [troops], when you shall be content with them. If they do not serve to go to England, at the least they will serve to go to Ireland. The state of Christendom dependeth upon the stout assailing of England.’
Clearly, William Allen had begun to align himself with the more overtly political of the Catholic agitators, in addition to his own self-appointed task as director of missionaries. What was unclear was precisely how he intended to keep these two roles separate in the public mind. For separate they must be if his young priests were to be seen as agents of God rather than agents of a foreign power.27
His answer, if he and his Reims and Roman College graduates were to be believed over Anthony Munday, was this: all discussion of English affairs of state was banned among the seminary students. Elizabeth’s name was never to be mentioned, neither in lectures nor in recreation. No student was to debate the extent of the Pope’s authority over Christian rulers and no reference was to be made to the Pope’s right to depose a monarch from their throne. William Allen was training his students ‘so that they may serve the one side without offence to the other, which is the hardest thing in the world where the two contrary parties be man and God’. His solution was single-minded. No matter how sullied his own reputation was fast becoming, his missionaries-in-training would be political virgins. It was a theoretical distinction that might have made perfect sense in the classroom; what was less certain was whether it could ever make perfect sense in the outside world, particularly in England. Allen might have trained his students in the art of disputation, he might have schooled them in the scriptures, he might have fired them up with a hatred of heresy and inured them to physical pain. But he was sending them into a country whose Queen stood under sentence of deposition from the very Church they represented, and the only protection he had given them, their only defence against the charge of being agitators and secret agents, was that they had not been allowed to discuss politics during their training. More useful would have been detailed discussions about the realities of the political situation into which they were about to be dropped, about the theological doubts concerning Pope Pius’ right to depose the Queen, about the impossibility of separating religion from politics in a country whose Church was a construct of Parliament. Had Allen’s holy warriors been equipped to live for the cause or simply to die for it?* As they left the safe confines of Douai for the cold and treacherous waters of their homeland the answer would soon become apparent.28
On the night of 24 April 1576 the thirty-two-year-old Cuthbert Mayne, newly ordained into the Catholic Church, made the short Channe
l crossing to England, one of eighteen Douai graduates to make the journey that year. At daybreak he stepped ashore on the south coast, home again after an absence of three years. He was supplied with letters of introduction to the Catholic Sir Francis Tregian of Golden House in Cornwall, so, after taking leave of his fellow missionary John Payne, he set off for the West Country.29
The journey was long and nerve-racking as Mayne tried to avoid the ever present shire watches on the lookout for vagabonds and agitators. To be stopped meant to be questioned and to be questioned meant putting his cover story to unwelcome scrutiny.
Keeping well to the south of Barnstaple, near which he had been born and where he was certain of being recognized, Mayne arrived at last at Golden House. Here, in his new disguise as the Tregian family’s steward, he began working as William Allen had trained him, travelling the Tregian estates between Truro and Launceston, saying mass for the faithful and reconciling to the Church any who had faltered. Summer turned peacefully to autumn. In December that year news filtered slowly through the country of the Queen’s clash with her new Archbishop of Canterbury and her displeasure at his Puritan leanings. Christmas and Easter were celebrated at Golden House with full Catholic ceremony. Spring turned to summer. On 8 June 1577 Cuthbert Mayne was sitting in the gardens of Golden House when a party of some one hundred men rode into view. At their head was the new High Sheriff of Cornwall, Richard Grenville, a ruthless naval adventurer with no love of Catholicism. Mayne rose quietly from his seat and left the garden ‘where he might have gone from them’, heading for his room.30
But Grenville was acting on inside information: ‘the first place they went unto was M. Mayne’s chamber, which being fast shut, they bounced and beat at the door. M. Mayne came and opened it’. To Grenville’s question ‘What art thou?’ Mayne answered simply ‘I am a man’. But when Grenville ripped open Mayne’s doublet he found about his neck an Agnus Dei case. Agnus Deis were small wax discs made from the Easter candles, impressed with an image of the paschal lamb and blessed by the Pope. They had been outlawed by Parliament in 1571. The penalty for possessing one was death. Among Mayne’s papers was found a copy of a papal bull, issued by Pope Pius’s successor, Gregory XIII. These, too, had been outlawed by Parliament in 1571, in response to Pius’s Bull Regnans. To bring any papal bull into the country was now a treasonable offence. So Cuthbert Mayne, former fellow of St John’s College, Oxford and graduate of William Allen’s seminary, was arrested and borne triumphantly away, first to Truro and then to the dank, underground castle gaol at Launceston.31
At the Michaelmas Assizes, Mayne was led out before Sir Roger Marwood, Chief Baron of the Exchequer, and indicted on five counts, the most serious being the obtaining of a papal bull and the publishing of that bull in England. The sentence was death for high treason. It mattered little that the papal bull had expired, had no bearing on English affairs and had not in fact been distributed by Mayne since his arrival in England; Mayne claimed he had only brought it with him by mistake. It mattered less that the judges themselves were worried by the verdict and sent urgently to the Council for advice on how to proceed. The Council was by now extremely concerned by the reports it was receiving from its spies of an influx of Douai graduates into the country—some thirty priests had arrived home since the return of the first four pioneers in 1574—and was in no mood for mercy. The sentence stood.32
Then on the morning of 29 November Mayne was offered his life. If he would swear on the Bible that Elizabeth was the supreme head of the Church of England he would be spared execution. Mayne refused. He went further: he reasserted his belief that England would soon be restored to the Catholic faith by the ‘secret instructors’ from Douai. And then, sealing his fate (and stepping outside the strictly apolitical role being claimed by Allen for his students), he declared that should ‘any Catholic prince…invade any realm to reform the same to the authority of the See of Rome, that then the Catholics in that realm…should be ready to assist and help them’. The offer of a reprieve was rescinded.33
Cuthbert Mayne was ‘drawn a quarter of a mile to the place of execution, and when he was to be laid on the sled, some of the Justices moved the Sheriff’s deputy, that he would cause him to have his head laid over the car, that it might be dashed against the stones in drawing, and M. Mayne offered himself that it might be so, but the Sheriff’s deputy would not suffer it’. This sheriff’s deputy was a merciful man. He let Mayne hang until he was dead before disembowelling him, quartering him, and distributing his parts about the county for display. For his role in the affair, Sir Francis Tregian was sentenced to life imprisonment and his estates were seized and given to Sir George Carey, a cousin of the Queen.* John Stow, in his Chronicle of that year, recorded: ‘Cuthbert Maine [sic] was drawn, hanged and quartered at Launceston, in Cornwall, for preferring Roman power.’34
Cuthbert Mayne had become the Douai seminary’s first martyr. When his old master at Oxford learned of his death he exclaimed, ‘Wretch that I am, how has that novice distanced me! May he be favourable to his old friend and tutor! I shall now boast of these titles more than ever.’ Such was the power of dying for your faith, and not even the fact that Mayne had been executed as a traitor to his country could tarnish this. Yes, he had broken existing treason laws, but did anyone seriously believe that owning an out-of-date copy of a nondescript bull and a few wax discs posed a threat to national security?35
However, as the dust settled on Mayne’s quartered remains and the political post-mortem began, it was soon clear that neither side had won a decisive victory in this opening skirmish. Catholics could claim that Cuthbert Mayne was a traitor only according to the most rigid set of definitions, in regard to his possession of a papal bull, or on the basis of hypothesis alone, in regard to his attitude towards Catholic invasions. But in regard to that same attitude, the English Government could claim that Allen’s supposed political virgins were uncommonly quick to pronounce on matters apart from their faith. Blessed martyr of a persecuted Church, or secret agent of an enemy state? Cuthbert Mayne had become all things to all men. His foolishness in being caught with Agnus Deis and a papal bull, and his clumsy defence of the Pope’s powers of deposition had left Catholics confirmed in their belief that they were being penalized for their religion, and the Government confirmed in its belief that Allen’s seminarians were stirring for invasion. The battle lines had just been made clearer.
But for the young missionaries-in-training, Mayne’s execution revealed to them that here was a war they might wage for the ultimate prize: the crown of martyrdom itself.* Just months after Mayne’s death the Catacombs were unearthed beneath the city of Rome, to ecstatic celebration among Catholics: here was proof that they and their Church were the direct descendants of those early Christian martyrs, sprung from their blood and their bones. And for a new generation the chance to save that Church was being offered to them again.
‘Listen to our heavenly Father asking back his talents with usury; listen to the Church, the mother that bore us and nursed us, imploring our help; listen to the pitiful cries of our neighbours in danger of spiritual starvation; listen to the howling of the wolves that are spoiling the flock. The glory of your Father, the preservation of your mother, your own salvation, the safety of your brethren, are in jeopardy, and can you stand idle?…Do not, I pray you, regard such a tragedy as a joke; sleep not while the enemy watches; play not while he devours his prey; relax not in idleness and vanity while he is dabbling in your brother’s blood…See then, my dearest and most instructed youths, that you lose none of this precious time, but carry a plentiful and rich crop away from this seminary, enough to supply the public wants, and to gain for ourselves the reward of dutiful sons.’
With such words ringing in their ears it was little wonder that, to their mentor William Allen, the student priests seemed ‘like men striving with all their might to put out a conflagration. They cannot in any way be kept back from England’.36
During Elizabeth’s first Parliame
nt, Sir Thomas White, founder of St John’s College, Oxford and a staunch Catholic, had exclaimed in fury and despair that ‘it was unjust that a religion begun in such a miraculous way, and established by such grave men, should be abolished by a set of beardless boys’. Some twenty years on, the job of saving White’s miraculous religion had fallen to another set of beardless boys. As William Cecil would write, with an old man’s frustration at youth’s idealism, ‘The greatest number of papists is of very young men.’ In a few years’ time John Gerard and Nicholas Owen would be old enough to join their number. Meanwhile in Prague, a former fellow of White’s college, and the author of that rallying call to the students at Douai’s seminary, was about to step into the fray. His name was Edmund Campion.37
* * *
* The Council of Trent met in three sessions during the mid-sixteenth century, its purpose to revivify the Roman Church, enabling it to meet the challenge of Protestantism. The Council worked to establish a set of fixed doctrinal definitions for the Catholic faith and to re-order its institutional structure, emphasizing the subordination of the entire Catholic hierarchy to the Pope. Out of the Council of Trent sprang what has been termed the Counter-Reformation, a movement almost as amorphous as the Reformation it opposed, but which can loosely be defined as the attempt at re-conquest of those parts of Christendom lost to the Catholic Church. Rome’s army of arguers, as featured in this book, was a component of this movement.
† According to a contemporary Catholic description, ‘The pursuivants [were], for the most part, bankrupts and needy fellows, either fled from their trade for debt, and by the queen’s badge to get their protection, or some notorious wicked man.’