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

by Hogge, Alice

  The village of Oxborough lies about fifteen miles from Grimston. On a day probably in 1589, some time during the six to eight months he remained with the Yelvertons, John Gerard took the road south, riding through countryside studded with villages, small stone parish churches, dense coppices and damp marshland. It was a journey he must have made several times before, accompanied by his guide Edward Yelverton, but this time Gerard had specific work in hand and new company beside him. Nearing Oxborough, the spire of St John the Evangelist loomed out of the trees on the left. Ahead lay walls, outbuildings, a glimpse of formal gardens and the tall twin redbrick turrets of the medieval gatehouse of Oxburgh Hall, home to the Bedingfeld family.

  Oxburgh had once belonged to those same rapacious Norfolk nobles who had roamed the county terrifying their neighbours, before passing into the hands of the more respectable Bedingfelds early in the fifteenth century. Edmund Bedingfeld had built the present house in the 1480s complete with moat and battlements, but his fortifications were more for decoration than defence, sign of the changing times.

  Cross over Oxburgh’s bridge today and pass through the wide brick archway and you come out into a large quadrangle, doorways opening off it. A porter’s lodge at the foot of the gatehouse’s western turret leads you to a circular brick staircase, climbing all the way up to the crenellated rooftop. From these stairs you can access the King’s Room, on the first floor over the archway, named after Elizabeth’s grandfather Henry VII, who stayed at Oxburgh in 1487. A pale northerly light streams in through its vast central window, picking out the huge fireplace opposite, and the fine silken bed hangings. In the far corner beyond the window stands a door that opens onto a small octagonal chamber set in the eastern turret. This, in turn, leads into a garderobe (lavatory) with its draughty opening down to the moat below.

  On that day in c.1589, with the then owner Thomas Bedingfeld’s blessing, this garderobe became the centre of concerted if highly clandestine activity. Nicholas Owen, Oxford joiner and hide-builder of genius, the Jesuits’ secret weapon in their holy war against the English Church, had just been put to work.

  While John Gerard had been travelling Europe, tasting prison and training as a Jesuit priest, Nicholas Owen had remained in Oxford. In 1577 his father had enrolled him on an eight-year apprenticeship, under the eye of Oxford joiner William Conway. Here he had learned carving and turning, the creating of seamless joints, the constructing of wide-beamed wooden staircases that curled around landings, untwisting from floor to ceiling, of sinuous, linenfold panelling that enveloped a room, of coffers, chests, bedsteads and joint-stools. In 1587 the commentator W. Harrison observed, ‘The furniture of our houses…is grown in manner even to passing delicacy and herein I do not speak of the nobility and gentry only, but likewise of the lowest sort in most places of our south country.’ Nicholas Owen was trained in the deceptive art of conjuring delicacy out of dense English oak.35

  Nothing is known of Owen in the four years between his completing this apprenticeship and starting work at Oxburgh Hall, though according to Gerard, he, too, was a newcomer to the mission. But if the details of Owen’s childhood and early adulthood remain an enticing blank, we do know that in 1588 or 1589 an unknown Oxford joiner in his mid to late twenties presented himself to Jesuit Superior Henry Garnet, asking to be his servant. And however this meeting came about, Garnet leapt at the offer.36

  In 1585, the year before Garnet’s arrival in England, a clause had been introduced into English law that had horrified Catholics. The clause was part of the new Treason Act against Jesuit priests; it stated that any layman who ‘shall wittingly and willingly receive, relieve, comfort, aid, or maintain any such Jesuit, [or] seminary priest…shall…for such offence be adjudged a felon’. It was small comfort that the House of Lords rejected an earlier draft of the bill, attempting to make the crime an act of treason rather than felony: the penalty in either case was death. English Catholics now found themselves in potentially the same position as England’s first martyr St Alban, killed c.304 for offering refuge to a Christian priest.37

  In April that year, soon after the clause became law, an emergency meeting was called at Hoxton to the west of the city of London, home of Mr Wylford. Attending the meeting were leading members of the Catholic laity, including Sir Thomas Tresham, Sir William Catesby and Lord Vaux, along with representatives of the seminary priests. Also present was Garnet’s immediate predecessor as Jesuit Superior, Father William Weston.* The talk was angry and urgent. In view of this change in legislation, against which all of them had protested, was it fair to expect Catholic householders to give aid to the missionaries arriving from the Continent? No matter how desperate the priests’ need for shelter, should families risk their lives and their lands by taking them in? No doubt many views were aired, but finally it was agreed ‘that the priests shall shift for themselves abroad, as in inns or such like places, and not visit any Papists…except they be sent for’. The young priests were not to be left entirely unprovided for, though: ‘it was ordered the Lord Vaux should pay to the relief of priests that would tarry, one hundred marks’. Tresham, Catesby and Wylford would pay ‘one hundred marks the piece’. Certain ‘other gentlemen’ were assessed ‘at lower sums’. All this money was to be placed into a central fund and administered by Vaux’s son Henry, a former cohort of George Gilbert, on behalf of the priests. The meeting broke up soon afterwards and the members departed to break the unhappy news to the rest of the missionaries. All except one man. He sat down to write to Sir Francis Walsingham. Within hours the Council was in possession of a detailed account of all that had taken place at Hoxton. Government agent Nicholas Berden—who earlier had written ‘I profess myself a spy, but I am not one for gain but to serve my country’—had earned his retainer that day.* 38

  The solution reached at Hoxton was only intended as a stopgap measure while the Catholic laity petitioned Elizabeth to repeal the offending clause. Should that fail, wrote Berden, they were determined ‘to adventure the danger of the statute’. The following year William Weston, along with the newly arrived Henry Garnet and Robert Southwell, reconvened at Hurleyford on the banks of the River Thames near Marlow, to decide how best to break the new law safely. Hurleyford belonged to the Catholic Richard Bold. It was a secluded house with the added advantage of standing on the Berkshire/Buckinghamshire border. Should it be raided in the general search of Catholic properties ordered that month, Weston would try to escape by crossing the county line; pursuivants had no authority outside their own shire.39

  Present at the meeting were familiar faces from Hoxton and each day, after a sung mass conducted by ‘Mr Byrd, the very famous English musician and organist’, they sat down to discuss business.† The only absentee from before was Nicholas Berden, so sadly the precise details of this business have not been recorded; Weston only notes ‘I told them what I knew about conditions in England’. The figures would have made poor listening. Since 1574 some three hundred priests, seminary and Jesuit, had returned home, but of them, only about one hundred and thirty were still at work; thirty-three had been executed, fifty were in prison, several had died from natural causes and over sixty had been banished or fled voluntarily. Since it took between two and seven years to train a priest and the seminaries operated on a tight budget, this was not a good return on investment; a new policy was in order. Weston noted, ‘Then we discussed our future methods of work and the prospects that lay before us.’ It seemed these future methods were to depend heavily on men like Nicholas Owen.40

  Cuthbert Mayne had been arrested in his bedroom at Golden House. Edmund Campion had been discovered with two others in a rudimentary shelter visible from the outside; during the same raid his host’s brother had been forced to hide in the dovecote. Robert Persons once took refuge in a haystack.* It was clear that though basic hiding places existed in some Catholic houses—to conceal forbidden priests and forbidden books—there had as yet been no real attention paid to hide-building as a necessary and improvable craft. W
eston, himself, could attest to this. Once he had hidden in a barn; on another occasion he had fled underground, to a purpose-built hide. ‘Catholic houses have several places like this,’ he wrote, ‘otherwise there would be no security.’ This one, though, ‘was constructed with no particular cunning or ingenuity’. It ‘was dark, dank and cold, and so narrow that I was forced to stand the entire time’. Weston was lucky. Had his hide been tucked into the side of a chimney-stack, or positioned in the hole under a garderobe turret, as so many of these early ones were, he would soon have been found (as they, themselves, have been). Such hides were built to a formula and discovered formulaically. With the Hurleyford conference this was to change. If Catholic families were safely to be provided with a priest, then they must also be provided with a safe priest-hole. Five days after the meeting broke up Weston was arrested on the streets of London near Bishopsgate and Henry Garnet was left in charge of implementing this policy. No wonder he was happy to welcome Nicholas Owen to the Jesuit mission.

  As John Gerard opened up the county of Norfolk for the Jesuits, carrying out the work for which Campion had been destined at the time of his arrest, Nicholas Owen rode with him. They made a contrasting pair: the aristocratic Gerard, to whom Garnet had given the nickname Long John of the Little Beard, and the diminutive Owen, who soon became known as Little John. With Edward Yelverton vouching for Gerard to neighbours sympathetic to the faith and with Gerard vouching for Owen as the Jesuits’ hide-builder, a chain was quickly formed leading from Norfolk, via London (which served as a general sorting office), all the way to the colleges on the Continent. Henry Garnet would later describe this chain, and the others like it, criss-crossing the country, to Jesuit General Claudio Aquaviva: ‘When the priests first arrive from the seminaries, we give them every help we can. The greater part of them, as opportunity offers, we place in fixed residences. This is done in a very large number of families through our offices.’42

  The individual links in this chain were comparatively simple to forge. ‘It will be necessary…for the priests to be stationed in various parts of the country and for each of them to stay at the house of some gentleman or other,’ George Gilbert had written. John Gerard’s job was to reconcile such a gentleman and then persuade him to take in a priest. Then came Nicholas Owen’s contribution.43

  Under cover of carrying out legitimate building or repair work Owen would craft a hiding-place, working in secret and as near to silence as he could manage, for any attention drawn to the location of the hide rendered it useless for its purpose. Even loyal servants were kept from learning the whereabouts of a hide, for fear torture might turn them. Owen’s genius was to exploit the main structure of a house, burrowing deep into the masonry of its interior, lodging his hide within the very framework of the building, within what, to the practised eye of the pursuivants, could only be solid wall or ceiling. His hides are three-dimensional puzzles of Max Escher-like complexity. And, for maximum safety, every one of them was different. John Gerard summed up Owen’s career: ‘he was so skilful both to devise and frame the [hides] in the best manner, and his help therein desired in so many places, that I verily think no man can be said to have done more good of all those that laboured in the English vineyard’.44

  It was impossible for Owen to build every hide for every priest stationed across England by the Jesuits. It seems he concentrated on those hides used by the Jesuits, themselves, and on those hides destined for ‘the chiefest Catholic houses’, while elsewhere acting as an adviser and discoursing ‘of the fashion of [hides] for the making of others’. In this way he came to know ‘the residences of most priests in England, and of all those of the Society’; he also knew ‘the means and manner how all such places were to be found, though made by others’. It was a heavy burden of knowledge. But it was a burden Owen seemed more than capable of carrying. ‘One reason that made him so much desired by Catholics of account, who might have had other workmen enough to make conveyances in their houses, was a known and tried care he had of secrecy.’ ‘He was’, wrote Gerard, ‘so careful that you should never hear him speak of any houses or places where he had made such hides.’ Thomas Bedingfeld had reason to be grateful for this secrecy as Owen now set to work at Oxburgh Hall.45

  In the garderobe off the King’s Room, set against the interior wall, was a small recess of door height. It suggested the room might once have had another purpose; perhaps the recess held an altar or prie-Dieu and the room had served as a private chapel. At the foot of this recess Owen chiselled away a small section of the tiled floor. Today, if you place your foot close to the recess’s wall and tread heavily on this section, it swings open, revealing the entrance to the hide beneath. The ‘lid’ is some nine inches thick, made of two solid oak blocks bolted together and with a layer of tiles to camouflage it. In place, it is seamless and unnoticeable. It is rapproof, ring-proof, and its balance when it pivots is perfect. Slip through it and you enter the hide itself, an irregularly shaped brick vault that opens above and beyond you, like a capital L stretched out on its side, measuring about three feet at its widest point, two feet at its narrowest and at its tallest over seven feet high. It lies between the walls of the King’s Room, to its west, and a collection of smaller rooms and stairs to its east. One of these rooms served as the Bedingfelds’ secret chapel and at the end of the L’s vertical, close to this chapel, was the second entrance to the hide, now filled in. This entrance made use of the natural features of the house: one of the treads on a small set of stairs in an adjoining passageway hinged open to reveal a gap wide enough for a man to squeeze through to the hide behind. In the base of the L is a ledge with a wooden seat and evidence of a communication hole with the King’s Room beyond it. The whole is remarkably comfortable, relatively soundproof and utterly undetectable.46

  It is improbable that Owen hollowed out the entire vault from scratch—it is unnecessarily large and unnecessarily irregular for its purpose. More likely there was some sort of empty space there already, created when the house itself was built; the family name for it—The Dungeon—points to a possible former usage. Owen’s genius was to conceal whatever original entrance there might have been and build two new ones, invisible to the most avid of searchers. In February 1590 his work was put to the test.

  That month a seemingly anonymous letter was sent to Henry, Lord Crumwell, a Norfolk justice. The letter gave information against Henry Bedingfeld, Thomas’ son and owner of Oxburgh since his death that year, of ‘some treasonable designs in conjunction with the Papists and Recusants’. The informant might have been right about Henry’s connection with papists and recusants, but the accusation of treason smacks more of self-interest than accuracy. Henry was only eight years old. Nonetheless Crumwell ordered a diligent search of the house. Nothing suspicious was found and Crumwell duly reported this fact to Sir Francis Walsingham, enclosing a copy of the letter delating Henry as a traitor to add to the ever increasing body of evidence held against the Bedingfelds. Nicholas Owen’s hide had withstood its first challenge. No priest had been found. The link in the chain had held.

  As the years went on, more and more links would be added to this chain as more and more priests arrived to take their place on the mission. Campion had spoken of a ‘league’ of men, of ‘many innocent hands’, gathered beyond the seas, determined to reconcile England to the Catholic Church. With the Jesuits’ new policy in place and with men like Garnet, Gerard and Owen to implement it, these words no longer had such a hollow ring. But if Campion had promised priests in profusion, he had also made another promise: ‘never to despair your recovery, while we have a man left to enjoy your Tyburn’; ‘to win you to heaven, or to die upon your pikes’. As the network grew, as it lengthened and spread across the country, so more and more priests would keep their grisly side to this bargain. The links in the chain might be simple to forge, but they were also simple to break, and one man had made it his personal mission to do precisely that.47