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

by Hogge, Alice

  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.’21

  Among his first converts were three members of Yelverton’s own family, including the Protestant Charles Yelverton and the Calvinist Jane Lumner. Before Gerard’s arrival at Grimston Jane had reportedly expressed certain anxieties about the state of her soul. A consultation with the ill-famed Dr Perne of Peterhouse had left her more confused than ever. Hearing Gerard say ‘time and again that the Catholic faith was the only true and good one, she began to have doubts, and in this state of mind, she brought [him] one day an heretical book which more than anything had confirmed her in her heresy’. Here was a chance for the priest to vindicate William Allen’s training methods. Allen had prepared his students for a war of words, schooling them in reasoning and rhetoric. Now Gerard proceeded to demonstrate ‘all the dishonest quotations from Scripture and the Fathers, the countless quibbles and mis-statements of fact’. Few English theologians were equipped to engage in dialectical combat of this sort single-handedly. Certainly no layperson was. Jane Lumner would prove an easy and a lasting convert. From then on her name was always among the annual lists of ‘obstinate’ Catholics returned to the Bishop of Norwich for the purpose of fining; the last entry dates from 1615, probably the year of her death.22

  Catholicism bound the Norfolk gentry together; marriage bound them tighter still. Yelvertons wed Bedingfelds, Bedingfelds wed Southwells—theirs was a network of such interconnectedness as the Jesuits could only dream of, criss-crossing the county, extending deep into Suffolk and Essex too. Many had benefited from the wholesale disposal of church lands at the Dissolution, seizing the chance to extend their estates and entrench their position as the traditional power brokers of old England. Robert Southwell grew up at Horsham St Faith near Norwich, within sight of the Benedictine priory acquired by his grandfather Sir Richard. It was one of four such properties bought by the family as some of the best real estate in England changed hands.* 23

  So at Elizabeth’s accession, with their new lands and old influence, the Yelvertons, the Bedingfelds, the Southwells seemed set to enjoy the peace and prosperity the new Queen was intent on pursuing. By the time of Gerard’s arrival at Grimston it was clear that for them, such peace and prosperity would never again be possible. The leniency of the 1559 settlement might not have given way to martyr-making in the style of Mary Tudor but it had, by 1588, crystallized into something altogether harder and more finely focused. There were no public tribunals or baying mobs, no calls to recant and save your soul, no crisis of survival in fact—rather, the slow, sapping efficiency of English law.

  From the very first, the peace of the Catholic Norfolk gentry had been threatened. In 1561 it had come to the Council’s attention that Sir Edward Waldegrave’s estate at Borley in Essex was serving as a mass centre for a number of visiting Norfolk gentry. Waldegrave was arrested and dispatched to the Tower where he later died; the others were imprisoned in Colchester gaol. To the Government its policy was clear: such high profile arrests served as an example to the rest of the county, obviating the need for further action. Seventeen years on it seemed Norfolk’s landowners were due another lesson.24

  In the summer of 1578 Elizabeth embarked upon her annual royal progress, this time through Suffolk and Norfolk. ‘The truth is’, wrote Thomas Churchyard, who observed the proceedings, ‘they had but small warning…of the coming of the Queen’s Majesty into both those shires.’ Once word of Elizabeth’s impending arrival leaked out, though, the preparations took on a frantic air: ‘all the velvets and silks were taken up that might be laid hand on, and bought for any money, and soon converted to…garments and…robes’. On Sunday, 10 August Edward Rookwood, now suitably attired, welcomed Elizabeth and her entourage to Euston Hall near Thetford. On the morning of Monday, 11 August, as Elizabeth took her leave, Rookwood was arrested. Royal hanger-on Richard Topcliffe described the scene to the Earl of Shrewsbury. The Lord Chamberlain ‘demanded of [Rookwood] how he durst presume to attempt [Elizabeth’s] real presence, he, unfit to accompany any Christian person; forthwith said he was fitter for a pair of stocks; commanded him out of the Court, and yet to attend her Council’s pleasure; and at Norwich he was committed’. Rookwood was charged with refusing to attend his parish church, ‘contrary to all good laws and orders and against the duty of good subjects’. Joining him in the dock were nine other Norfolk gentlemen, all guests at a dinner in honour of the Queen
hosted by Lady Style of Braconash near Norwich; among them were Sir Henry Bedingfeld, Humphrey Bedingfeld and Robert Downes, John Gerard’s contact from the Norwich inn. Rookwood and Downes, already excommunicate for non-attendance, were imprisoned until such time as they should conform. The others were placed under house arrest in Norwich, fined 200 pounds and instructed to conform or face a lengthy gaol sentence. So much for their hopes of peace.25

  Soon their prosperity would be forfeit too. For although there was no way of measuring whether the actual number of Catholics was increasing under the influence of William Allen’s missionaries, there was a sure way of determining the effect the priests were having on existing Catholics. From 1574 onwards the number of people fined for refusing to attend their parish church grew steadily. Before long these dissenters had earned a name for themselves: recusants, from the Latin recusare, to refuse. Before long, too, a simple truth had dawned on many in the Government: recusants meant revenue.

  In 1577 the Bishop of London wrote to Sir Francis Walsingham with a proposal. In view of this spread of recusancy, he and his colleagues were devising a scheme to ‘procure the Queen a thousand pounds by year to her Coffers’. Since the scheme involved bypassing existing law and imposing ‘round fines’ on all those refusing to receive Communion (not in itself a criminal offence), the bishop suggested Walsingham keep from Elizabeth the precise details of his proposal, ‘or else’, he added feelingly, ‘you can guess what will follow’. This small difficulty aside, the bishop reckoned his scheme would ‘weaken the enemy and touch him much nearer than any pain heretofore inflicted’. The proposal was never implemented. Evidently, though, it set Walsingham thinking. When the Privy Council carried out its nationwide census of recusants that year, included among the list of returns were precise details of how much every recusant was worth.26

  It took until 1581 for the Government to decide fully to profit from papistry. The arrival of the Jesuits the year before had removed even Elizabeth’s objections to sterner anti-Catholic measures. If her new Church of England was not to become a mockery, then no more English Catholics could be permitted to break the law and absent themselves from it. Up to now she had prevented Parliament from raising recusancy fines—no longer. Included in that year’s Treason Act was a clause designed to hit recusants hard. Overnight, the fines for non-attendance jumped from twelve pence up to twenty pounds per month. And for the purposes of calculation, the year was deemed to contain thirteen lunar months, rather than the customary twelve. William Cecil explained the new policy with unusual political candour: ‘The causes that moved the renewing of this law was for that it was seen that the pain being no greater than xii pence, no officer did seek to charge any offender therewith, so that numbers of evil disposed persons increased herein to offend with impunity.’27

  Now the full moneymaking potential of Catholic recusancy could be realized—and legally too. Soon a Hampshire clerk of the peace was writing to the Council complaining that ‘The number of recusants which at every session are to be indicted is so great that [I am] driven to spend…a great deal of time before and after every session…in drawing and engrossing the indictment[s].’ In 1587 new legislation was introduced to make the collection of recusancy fines more efficient. To ease the pressure on the courts recusants could now be convicted in their absence, on the evidence of informers, disgruntled relatives or jealous neighbours. Henry Garnet wrote to the Jesuit General in fury that ‘any utterly base creature can cast it in our teeth that we are unfitted to have our share of life in common with them’. Another clause allowed the Exchequer to seize two-thirds of the recusant’s estate in default of payment. They ‘build their houses with the ruins of ours’, wrote Robert Southwell angrily, and ‘by displanting of our offspring adopt themselves to be heirs of our lands’.28

  It was not just fines from which the Government was determined to benefit. In 1585 recusants were assessed for contributions ‘towards the providing of horses and furniture for her Majesty’s present services in the Low Countries’. As the Council explained, given the religious nature of the up-coming conflict ‘her Majesty seeth so much the less cause to spare them in this’. In Norfolk, County Sheriff Sir Henry Woodhouse began the unpleasant process of extracting forced donations from his recusant neighbours. Evidently he was sympathetic to their plight. In December that year he wrote to Walsingham apologizing for his delay and naming only the unfortunate Robert Downes as capable of furnishing a light horse for the cavalry.* Other Catholics in other counties were not so lucky. Londoner Mary Scott wrote to the Council begging to be excused payment. Her husband—on account of whose recusancy the family was being assessed—had died just four days earlier, she explained, and now she was ‘plunged in many cares’. Mrs Margaret Blackwell of Sussex wrote with an even more heartfelt plea. She had never been absent from church, she protested, and she enclosed a certificate signed by Arthur Williams, parson, and all the churchwardens of the parish of St Andrew’s to prove her statement. And in March 1585 John Gerard’s father would write to the government, apologizing for his failure to pay the military levies (on account of his debts) and, instead, ‘offering his person to serve Her Highness in any place in the world’.29

  These new anti-Catholic measures were entirely in tune with a financial policy grown increasingly desperate as the looming war with Spain began to drain the Exchequer dry.* Moreover, they upheld Elizabeth’s determination that the extirpation of Catholicism from England should never be seen as religious persecution. Yes, she explained, there were ‘a Number of Men of Wealth in our Realm, professing contrary Religion’, but none was ‘impeached for the same…but only by Payment of a peculiar Sum, as a Penalty for the Time that they do refuse to come to Church’. English Catholics were still only being punished for breaking the law; that the law forbade the profession of their faith was really neither here nor there. However, behind closed doors at Westminster something else was happening that was altogether more invidious. It revealed itself in a bid to make Catholics turn in their weapons, in a motion that they be expected to pay double rates as foreigners did, in MP Dr Peter Turner’s demand that they be forced to wear an identifying badge so ‘that by some token a Papist may be known’. Catholics were different; Catholics were dangerous; Catholics were other. Not content that Catholicism had become un-English by imputation, Parliament was attempting to make it un-English by force of law.30

  For Norfolk’s gentry, for the Yelvertons, Bedingfelds and Southwells, the effects of such a policy were devastating. In 1574 Edward Rishton had written: ‘the greater part of the country gentlemen was unmistakably Catholic; so also were the farmers throughout the kingdom…Not a single county except those near London and the Court…willingly accepted the heresy’. If the city and the Court, both frantic and fast-moving, spoke for the new religion, then the Norfolk gentry and their ilk, farmers, countrymen and landowners, all rooted in the slower rhythms of the soil, spoke for the old—and they saw no reason to change. For them Catholicism was the traditional religion of Englishmen and women since Christianity was first introduced to the isle almost a thousand years before; it was the stripling Germano-Swiss construct Protestantism that was the foreign interloper. For the new merchant-class Members of Parliament to tell them they were un-English impugned their rank, for their fellow Englishmen to tell them they were traitors impugned their patriotism, but for them to change their beliefs impugned their very identity. Moreover it imperilled their mortal souls.31

  Small wonder that on the eve of the Spanish Armada, they looked on in baffled disbelief as many Catholics were rounded up, along with every foreigner in the country, and summarily interned as a threat to national security. As the Council explained to those charged with arresting them, the Queen was ‘hardly ventured to repose that trust in them which is to be looked for in her other good subjects’. No doubt their response was similar to that of Northamptonshire Catholic Sir Thomas Tresham, who begged for the chance ‘to witness to the world and leave record to all posterity of our
religious loyalty and true English valour’. His plea fell upon deaf ears.32

  If families like the Yelvertons, Bedingfelds and Southwells were finding it hard to accept the new religion, then they had now become the focus not only of the Government’s attention, but also of the Jesuits’. When Henry Garnet and Robert Southwell sailed for England in 1586, among their instructions from Rome was an order to deal only with the gentry.* It would be wrong to view this as snobbery on the part of the mission. Rather it offered a realistic appraisal of Elizabethan society. As Gerard wrote, ‘in the districts I was living in now Catholics were very few. They were mostly from the better classes; none or hardly any, from the ordinary people, for they are unable to live in peace, surrounded as they are by most fierce Protestants’. Tudor England might have seen the unstoppable rise of the middle classes, but there was no concomitant improvement in the situation of, or attitudes to, the working classes. Bluntly, the ordinary people were considered of little importance in the subtle game being fought for religious supremacy. Shortly before leaving for England Edmund Campion would summarize the position thus (in terms immediately recognizable to his contemporaries, if distasteful today): ‘Of their martyrs they brag no more now. For it is now come to pass that for a few apostates and cobblers of theirs burned, we have Bishops, Lords, Knights, the old nobility.’33

  But it was the practical advantage gained by concentrating on the gentry that was of most concern to the Jesuits. The great country houses of Tudor England were still kingdoms within a kingdom, despite the decline of feudalism. As late as the 1580s the Earl of Derby’s household comprised some one hundred and forty members, excluding his family. According to thirteenth century ecclesiastical law a landowner was responsible for the spiritual probity of his vassals. In Elizabethan England this law might no longer apply, but the sentiment it encapsulated remained intact and it was a sentiment the Jesuits were quick to exploit. Convert the master and the servant would follow; reconcile a landowner to the Catholic Church and provide him with a seminary priest to minister to his household and the entire mini-kingdom could be won back to the faith. John Gerard summarized the policy thus: ‘The way, I think, to go about making converts…is to bring the gentry over first, and then their servants, for Catholic gentle folk must have Catholic servants.’ Practical, too, from the point of view of safety, was the fact that in the coming and going of a large house, one more face among so many could pass unnoticed. A new tutor, a steward who spent little time working as a steward, a visiting sportsman like John Gerard would not attract unwelcome attention. But there was another and even more specific safety aspect that, in the end, would make the country houses of England valuable to the Jesuit mission, that would turn them into the nation’s new Catholic churches. They had legions of rooms. They had capacious attics. They had many staircases and miles of corridors, they had underground sewers and solid, thick brickwork. In short, they had space. More importantly, they had sufficient space not just for the constructions of legitimate architecture, but for the concealments of an entirely different kind of building work. Upon their walls might hang the finest art; behind their walls lay craftsmanship no less masterly. ‘When God will protect,’ wrote John Gerard, ‘He can hide a Felix between two walls, and make spiders His workmen to cover the entry with their webs.’ Except neither God nor the Jesuits needed spiders as workmen: they had Nicholas Owen.34