God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests & the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot

by Hogge, Alice

  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, ‘the obstinate and stiff-necked Papist is far from being reformed as he hath gotten stomach to go backwards’.44

  Invective alone could never be enough, though, and for the next few months both Houses debated how best to counter the perceived threat. As so often before, Elizabeth acted as a restraining influence on her ministers and the legislation finally passed that session, entitled an ‘Act to retain the Queen’s Majesty’s subject in their due obedience’, was far milder than had at first seemed likely. It declared it treason to withdraw Elizabeth’s subjects ‘from their natural obedience’ to her, or to convert them ‘for that intent to the Romish religion’. All those who willingly allowed themselves to be converted would also be adjudged traitors.45

  It was the wording ‘for that intent’ that was significant here. It represented an attempt to wrest the problem of English Catholicism away from the religious, back towards the political, ground on which the Government knew itself to have surer footing. For the act failed plainly to define conversion to Catholicism as treason. Rather, it suggested, it was the withdrawal of allegiance to the Queen that such a conversion, by necessity, implied that was the real crime. Even as Campion and Persons declared their aim to be purely spiritual, Parliament was further enshrining opposition to the official English Church as a political act. Here was an argument that would run and run, but more immediately the new Treason Act and the anti-Jesuit vitriol that accompanied it merely served to reinvigorate the pursuivants trailing Campion and Persons. The hunt was closing in.

  On Tuesday, 11 July Campion bade farewell to Persons and set off from their safe house at Stonor in Oxfordshire on yet another round of travelling. He was scheduled to go east into Norfolk, a county as yet unvisited by the Jesuits, calling first at Houghton Hall in Lancashire to collect some papers he had left there. It was a roundabout route but by now the pair had begun to build up a network of safe houses between London and Lancashire where he could stagger his journey. First, though, he had a favour to ask of Persons. For some time now he had been begged by the owners of Lyford Grange near Wantage, the Yate family, to come and stay with them. As the Yates were known to be defiantly Catholic—Mr Yate was then a prisoner in London for recusancy, while his mother supported a community of two priests and eight nuns at the house—he had always felt it unwise to call there before. Now, though, he was passing close by Wantage. Would Persons give him permission to stay at Lyford? He would not preach. Nor would he call attention to himself. And he would leave immediately the following morning. On these terms Persons agreed to his request.46

  The visit went according to plan and early the next day Campion was on the road again, heading towards Oxford. But back at Lyford the house was alive with whispers, the familiar little currents that sucked and eddied around Campion wherever he went. Visiting Catholic neighbours were dismayed to learn that they had missed the famous Campion; they were more dismayed still to learn that he had not even preached; he must be made to return to them at once, and a rider was dispatched to deliver this request. Campion was intercepted at an inn outside Oxford, talking with a group of students who had journeyed out from the university to meet him. As soon as the rider had passed on his message, the students’ voices rose up in unison: Campion must go back to Lyford and speak. The lay brother Ralph Emerson could ride on to Lancashire and collect his papers; indeed it would be safer that way, for hadn’t Persons been worried about Campion revisiting Houghton, and surely he and Emerson could arrange a rendezvous point in Norfolk? The two Jesuits were no match for this barrage and Campion was borne triumphantly back to Lyford Grange.47

  The next couple of days passed peacefully. Campion was introduced to a steady flow of Oxford students and local Catholics all eager to meet him. Word filtered quickly through the district that Campion was staying with the Yates. On the morning of Sunday, 16 July a Mr George Eliot arrived at Lyford. Eliot had served in a number of Catholic households across southern England and he was an old friend of the Yates’ cook, Thomas Cooper. He was also, it was said, a convicted rapist and murderer who had bargained his way out of gaol by turning informant. If this was true, it was known to very few, and soon Cooper whispered to Eliot that a secret mass was about to begin. Eliot’s companion, David Jenkins, who was not a Catholic (though he was, said Eliot, sympathetic to the faith), was left drinking beer in the buttery and Eliot, himself, was ushered through to a ‘fair, large chamber’ beyond, where Campion was preaching. Immediately the service ended Eliot and Jenkins, along with several others who had attended the celebration, rode away, leaving Campion to dine with members of the household and those few stalwarts who had stayed on to talk with him. At one o’clock the house was surrounded by a company of soldiers. At their head was the neighbouring magistrate, Mr Fettiplace. Beside him rode George Eliot and David Jenkins.48

  The pursuivants were held at the gate while Campion was hidden away. Then the doors were opened and the soldiers began their search for him. In the hours that followed they discovered ‘many secret corners’ but no sign of Campion. Mr Fettiplace grew apologetic at the inconvenience he was causing his neighbours; George Eliot grew more resolute—now he and
Jenkins took charge of the search. That night a guard was set about the house and next day the hunt resumed.49

  It was chance that finally led to Campion’s discovery. As the despondent pursuivants made to leave after a fruitless morning’s search, by now ‘clear void of any hope’, Jenkins ‘espied a chink in the wall of boards’ over the stairwell, ‘which he quickly found to be hollow’. Seizing a crowbar he broke through to a small chamber beyond, where Campion and two other priests lay concealed.* 50

  It was chance, too, that had led Eliot to Lyford in the first place. He was, he later admitted, on the trail of the seminary priest John Payne.† When he saw a servant keeping watch on the roof of Lyford he had simply decided to investigate further. With two such simple instances of chance the Jesuit mission lay in ruins.51

  Campion was led up to London under armed escort. With him were Fathers Ford and Collington, the two Lyford priests discovered with him in the hiding place, nine laymen, accused of aiding and abetting him and attending his forbidden mass, and the luckless Father William Filby, who had arrived at Lyford in secret only to find the place overrun with pursuivants and the magistrates in possession. At Henley, where the party spent the first night, Robert Persons, now in hiding at nearby Stonor, was able to send a servant to see how the captives were being treated. The servant reported back that Campion appeared in good spirits and was on friendly terms with his guards. It was George Eliot who was treated with disdain by soldiers and magistrates alike. Members of the watching crowds were even bold enough to shout out ‘Judas’ at the informer as he passed by.52

  As the party neared London, though, the procession took on a different aspect. At the Council’s request the prisoners were pinioned in their saddles, their arms strapped tightly behind them and their legs bound together by a rope slung beneath the belly of their mount. Campion, himself, rode at the front of the cavalcade, a sign about his head reading ‘Edmund Campion the Seditious Jesuit’. In this fashion they passed through the streets of London to the Tower.53

  The trial of Edmund Campion took place on 20 November 1581, four months after his arrest and imprisonment. The charges laid against him, and those arraigned with him, were that on specific dates in Rome and in Reims the previous year, Edmund Campion, Robert Persons, William Allen, the layman Henry Orton and the entire haul of priests then in custody, including Ralph Sherwin, Edward Rishton, Robert Johnson, the Lyford priests, Thomas Ford and John Collington, and William Filby, had conspired to murder Queen Elizabeth. Further to this they 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. Of course, the net result of his dubious opinion was a propaganda coup for the Protestants.