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

by Hogge, Alice

  * * *

  * Although Wodehouse was ordained during the reign of Queen Mary and was therefore entitled to amnesty under Elizabethan laws, he repeatedly denied Elizabeth’s claim to the throne—a treasonable offence. As a further irritant to the Privy Council he wrote copious letters in defence of the Catholic faith from his prison cell in the Fleet, which he tied to stones and threw to passers-by in the street below.

  * Edward Oldcorne arrived in Finsbury some time before Gerard. It appears he too behaved indiscreetly during his journey to London, though the precise nature of that indiscretion remains unclear. In his letter to Aquaviva Garnet begged the Jesuit General to ensure ‘that those who are sent hereafter…should properly understand their accounts and seek out some veteran as quickly as possible’.

  * The best description of Garnet and Southwell’s work so far—and of how they believed the mission should develop—is contained in a letter by Garnet to Claudio Aquaviva, written in June 1588. ‘This is the plan we have agreed on for the greater glory of God, when there shall be a greater number of [Jesuits] here. Two should be stationed in London—or one in London and one in the environment. The others should have assigned to each one a province or county in which each can work for all he is worth to promote religion. There will not be lacking other priests, men of outstanding holiness and learning who will come to their assistance—and to this we most of all can testify by experience. The field will be theirs to take over from our labours and the harvest from it will be beyond measure, owing to Him who guides the work of our hands unceasingly.’

  * For many years Shrewsbury was gaoler to Mary, Queen of Scots. Always vulnerable to accusations of leniency on account of his Catholic sympathies—his mother Mary Dacre was from a devoutly Catholic family—he was finally relieved of this duty in 1585. Many of the accusations made against him came from his second wife, the notorious Bess of Hardwick, who also accused him of having an affair with the Scottish Queen. The pair separated soon afterwards.

  * There seems to have been little love lost between the twenty-one-year-old Elizabeth and her warder. Bedingfeld found the princess so confusing he was at a loss to know ‘if her meaning go with her words, whereof God only is judge’. Elizabeth was reputed to have said to Bedingfeld that ‘if we have any prisoner whom we would have hardly and strictly kept, we will send him to you’.

  * A contemporary spy’s report refers to a suspected seminary priest who ‘under colour of teaching on the virginals goeth from Papist to Papist’.

  * The curiosity of English Catholics benefiting from the Dissolution of the Monasteries was noted by outsiders: Simon Renard, ambassador to the Holy Roman Emperor, would report home at the time of Queen Mary’s succession that the papists held far more of the plundered church property than the heretics.

  * The Woodhouses were a prominent Norfolk family with several Catholic members. Francis Woodhouse was forced to sell his Breccles estate in 1599 to pay his recusancy fines. He died in poverty in 1605. His wife Eleanor and son John were still ‘obstinate recusants’ in 1615. Sir Philip Woodhouse married Edward Yelverton’s sister Grisell—both were converts of John Gerard.

  * It was not always Catholics who suffered in this way—on occasion Elizabeth was compelled to extort forced loans from wealthy Anglicans too. In 1598 rumours that another such loan was imminent saw citizens ‘shrink and pull in their horns’; some Londoners even fled to the countryside to avoid payment.

  * This order echoed Everard Mercurian’s advice to Persons and Campion: ‘As regards dealing with strangers, this should, at first, be with the upper classes rather than with the common people, both on account of the greater fruit to be gathered and because the former will be able to protect them against violence of all sorts.’

  * Weston was born in Maidstone, Kent in 1550. He was an Oxford contemporary of Edmund Campion. On his return to England in September 1584 he took the alias Mr Edmunds in tribute to his friend. Weston was arrested in August 1586. Rather than risk the international opprobrium of killing another Jesuit, the Council imprisoned him. Friends took up his case, but no one was brave enough to intercede for him at court. One was said to comment: ‘If he were a common thief, or a murderer or buccaneer, or something of the kind, I would not hesitate one moment to obtain a pardon, or at least to ask for it. But where it is a matter of a Jesuit, I cannot; I am afraid to ask.’ He was finally released in 1603 and died in Spain in 1615.

  * Berden was one of the Council’s best spies. In 1586 he wrote to Walsingham: ‘I humbly thank your honour for that it pleased you to spare Christopher Dryland’s [a seminary priest] life at the last sessions…assuring you that it hath much increased my credit amongst the Papists…I protest I abhor the man in regard of his profession, [but he]…is singularly well persuaded of me, supposing me to be a most apt man to serve the Papists’ turn.’ Dryland was imprisoned until 1603, when he was banished. He went to Rome and became a Jesuit. When Berden’s treachery was finally exposed Walsingham arranged for him to take up the more lucrative if less adrenaline-charged post of purveyor of poultry to the Queen.

  † This was composer William Byrd. Byrd was educated under Thomas Tallis at St Paul’s Cathedral music school. By 1570 he had become a chorister of the Chapel Royal and by 1575 he was the Queen’s organist. Despite his Catholicism he seems to have enjoyed Elizabeth’s favour and was rewarded with a monopoly to print and publish sheet music.

  * A spy’s report of 1591 reveals that the priests made use of every sort of hiding place available to them. ‘As you go forth of Mr Wynshcomb’s house towards Newbury, in the first close without the gate, upon the left hand in the hedgerow, there is a great oak that is hollow, and by knocking upon it you shall find it to sound.’ It continued: ‘Oliver Almon is a priest and did lie at Mr Wynshcombe in Berkshire, near Newbury…If he be not in the house, there is a great tree wherein he is hidden.’

  Six

  ‘…they do come into the [Realm] by secret Creeks, and Landing Places,

  disguised, both in their Names and Persons’.

  Queen Elizabeth I, November 1591

  DURING THE CLOSING DAYS of the 1586-7 Parliament, the MP for Old Sarum, Richard Topcliffe, revealed to the House that in the building ‘joining to the Cloth of Estate’—next door but one in fact—a quantity of ‘weapons and all massing trumpery, with books papistical’ had just been uncovered. Such a viper’s nest of Catholicism on Parliament’s very threshold was intolerable. Immediately the Commons appointed a party ‘to search certain houses in Westminster suspected of receiving and harbouring Jesuits [and] seminaries’. There is no record of how the session ended.1

  Neither, sadly, is there any record of how the search party proceeded, though it is unlikely Topcliffe would have been happy with anything less than a lynch mob. No man took the outrage of the continued existence of English Catholicism more personally, it seemed, than Richard Topcliffe. His critics wondered whether he might not be a former Catholic himself.*

  Richard Topcliffe was born in 1532, the son of Robert Topcliffe of Somerby, Lincolnshire and Margaret, daughter of Lord Borough. His mother died when he was an infant, his father when he was twelve, and he was raised by an uncle, Sir Anthony Neville; he was educated at Gray’s Inn in London. In 1570, the year after the Northern Rebellion, he sued for the lands of one of the rebels, the Catholic Richard Norton of Norton Conyers, Yorkshire. Three years later he was in Lord Burghley’s pay for services unspecified. In 1578 he was reporting back with relish the unhappy events of Elizabeth’s Norfolk progress and by 1584 he was revealing the full fervour of his anti-Catholicism in a letter to the Privy Council. ‘My instruments have learned’, he warned, of bands of seminary priests roaming the capital. ‘They walk audaciously, disguised in the streets of London. Their wonted fears and timorousness is turned into mirth and solace.’ By the 1590s, not content with seeing Catholics wherever he went, he had become their judge, gaoler and executioner. He had also turned his Westminster house into a private torture chamber, the bette
r to serve this end. ‘Homo sordidissimus,’ spat the usually measured Henry Garnet, when called upon to describe him.2

  The career of Richard Topcliffe is perplexingly, paradoxically linked to one woman, Queen Elizabeth I herself. Moderate, pragmatic, uncharacteristically squeamish for a Tudor, Elizabeth gave licence to a monster. It was not just Catholics who found him so. In the fashionable in-speak of Court the word Topcliffizare soon came to mean to go recusant hunting. Meanwhile, Sir Anthony Standen, praising the manners of the new royal favourite the Earl of Essex, noted that ‘Contrary to our Topcliffian customs, he hath won more with words than others could do with racks.’ Throughout much of the 1590s Richard Topcliffe could be found at the head of an army of pursuivants raiding Catholic houses, in the torture chamber extracting evidence, in the courtroom cross-examining the accused, or on the scaffold overseeing executions. For all these activities he possessed only one title: that of Queen’s Pursuivant. It seemed, though, Topcliffe had something better than a title: he had the willing ear of Elizabeth.3

  The pair first came into contact in January 1570. On the tenth of that month the Earl of Leicester wrote to Elizabeth expressing his longing to hear from her. With bad weather making travelling difficult, Leicester employed as his messenger ‘a Mercury’ prepared ‘to take the more pains’ to deliver his letter. Mercury’s name, it transpired, was Richard Topcliffe.* And in a postscript Leicester described how Topcliffe had recently supplied ‘30 horse and men, all well appointed, at his own charge’ for the campaign against the Northern rebels. With Leicester vouching for him and with such a solid demonstration of loyalty to recommend him, Topcliffe evidently stuck in Elizabeth’s memory. Twenty years on she had few compunctions about turning to him for assistance and even fewer about doing so in private. ‘This most unclean of men’, wrote Garnet, ‘has attained…such favour with Her Highness that he always has easy access to her, and need not fear the power or influence of any Councillor or Minister.’4

  From the outset Elizabeth’s attitude to English Catholics had tended towards leniency; as much as her ministers had champed at the bit and demanded harsher measures against Catholics, so Elizabeth had held tight to the reins and refused to budge. When, in 1563, her pressing need for Parliamentary subsidies forced her to accept legislation extending the death penalty to anyone twice refusing to take the Oath of Supremacy, she promptly sabotaged the act by commanding her bishops never to tender the oath a second time.† ‘Compel them you would not; kill them you would not…trust them you should not,’ admonished a frustrated William Cecil. Beside her clemency, her dislike of bloodshed and her continued favour of many prominent Catholics, Elizabeth’s support of Richard Topcliffe sits like an uninvited guest at a wedding feast, unwelcome and impossible to ignore. Equally, it is almost impossible to explain.5

  In view of Elizabeth’s leniency, was Topcliffe’s ulterior purpose—a purpose assuredly kept from him—to serve as a sop to the Protestant hard-liners about her and prevent harsher anti-Catholic penalties being introduced in Parliament? Was his very lack of official status Elizabeth’s way of avoiding more official religious legislation? If this were the case, then were she to be accused by her ministers of being soft on papistry, Elizabeth need only point to Topcliffe to demonstrate the opposite was true. For someone who detested being bounced into hasty decisions as much as Elizabeth, Topcliffe’s presence provided a sure way of keeping in check the headlong drive for religious reform favoured by many in her Government and by most of her Parliaments.

  There is another possibility that presents itself. Sir William Cecil’s maxim, one to which first he then Francis Walsingham would adhere as they set about developing their far-reaching spy network, was that the only people a ruler could never trust were those they had irreparably harmed.* By this reasoning Elizabeth could never trust England’s Catholics, no matter that, as a religious conservative, she had more in common with them than with the Protestant extremists and radical Puritans about her. Indeed, the number of assassination plots over the course of her reign of which rogue Catholic terrorists were found to be at the bottom gave the ring of truth to Cecil’s claim. The Ridolfi Plot of 1571, the 1583 Throckmorton Plot, the 1585 Parry Plot and the Babington Plot of 1586 were all Catholic-supported attempts to remove Elizabeth from the English throne and replace her with Mary, Queen of Scots. When Pope Pius sanctioned Elizabeth’s overthrow in 1570—giving rise to Ridolfi, Throckmorton et al.—one of the Queen’s first actions had been to issue a proclamation restating her intention not to examine her subjects’ ‘consciences in causes of religion’. Richard Topcliffe, unlicensed by anyone but Elizabeth, was a useful counter-balance to this leniency. He was, perhaps, her private weapon in the battle against religious terrorism, while publicly she continued practising conciliation. There were few if any instances during the reign in which Elizabeth waged open warfare with a happy heart. Conflict was costly, bloody and, above all, uncertain in its outcome—three factors guaranteed not to endear it to the cautious Queen. Rather than making war on every Catholic in the land, the presence of Topcliffe on her staff allowed Elizabeth to make lightning strikes against likely insurgents, at minimal expense, with minimal loss of life and with minimal danger to herself. Such a luxury could not be under-estimated.6

  So with Elizabeth’s blessing and a supporting cast of similarly unsavoury characters—Anthony Munday was an early employee of his—Richard Topcliffe appears to have levelled his sights on bringing down the Catholic mission to England. Certainly his name appears with increasing regularity among the State papers of the period as he engaged in this pursuit. In January 1590 he received his first warrant from the Privy Council; it instructed him to subject the seminary priest and scholar Christopher Bales to ‘such torture upon the wall as is usual for the better understanding of the truth of matters’. Bales had sailed to England on the same ship as John Gerard and Edward Oldcorne two years earlier; he was also a former pupil of Robert Southwell’s at the English College in Rome. Perhaps this link with three out of the six Jesuits then at liberty in England exacerbated Bales’ fate.* He was manacled and strung up by his hands from an iron staple fixed to the prison wall, hanging there for twenty-four hours with the tips of his toes just touching the floor. In spite of this, he seems to have admitted little more than that he had been ordained overseas and had returned to England to minister as a Catholic priest. On these two counts he was indicted for treason—in which case, he was reported to have asked at his trial, was St Augustine not a traitor too? No, replied the presiding judge, Justice Anderson, for Augustine had fortuitously arrived before the introduction of these new laws. Bales was executed on 4 March in Fleet Street.7

  Two months later Topcliffe, himself, was on the Fleet Street scaffold to extort an eleventh hour confession from the seminary priest Anthony Middleton. Pointing about him, in the direction of nearby Gray’s Inn Lane and Shoe Lane, Topcliffe charged Middleton with taking refuge in Catholic houses in the area. Middleton replied, ‘You know, Mr Topcliffe, I never approached any man nor confessed any place.’ He died without naming those who sheltered him.8

  But if Bales and Middleton’s unwillingness to talk had saved the lives of many, then the case of Henry Walpole revealed just how dangerous Topcliffe might prove to the mission if once he truly targeted a victim. Henry Walpole was born in 1558, the eldest son of Christopher Walpole of Anmer Hall, Norfolk, on today’s Sandringham estate. He was educated at Peterhouse, Cambridge and in 1578, aged twenty, he moved to London to study at Gray’s Inn. Under different circumstances he would in time have qualified as a lawyer and returned home to take up his considerable inheritance, but on 1 December 1581 Walpole stood in the mud and rain of Tyburn fields to watch the execution of Edmund Campion. As the hangman hurled Campion’s entrails into the cauldron of boiling water, it was said that a gob of blood spattered Walpole’s white doublet: his fate was sealed. The following year Henry Walpole fled England for William Allen’s seminary at Reims and by February 1584 he had transferred to Ro
me to join the Society of Jesus. On 17 December 1588 he was ordained a Jesuit priest.9

  For the next five years Walpole travelled the Low Countries, for a time acting as chaplain to the Spanish forces there. Back in Norfolk his family was in contact with the recently arrived John Gerard. Soon Henry’s youngest brother Michael Walpole had become Gerard’s confidential servant, riding with him, wrote Gerard, ‘whenever I went to a house where my assumed status made it necessary for me to have one’. In 1589, under Gerard’s guidance, Michael left England to join the Jesuits himself. The next year Henry’s cousin Edward Walpole followed suit. Twelve months later Gerard had ‘persuaded another Walpole, Christopher by name, to come from Cambridge and see me. Then I received him into the Church, and, giving him the money for the journey, sent him to Rome’. ‘Gerard doeth much good,’ wrote Henry Walpole jubilantly. Meanwhile, a fourth brother, Thomas, had left England to serve as a mercenary overseas.* 10

  In 1593 Henry Walpole was sent as a minister to the recently established English seminary at Valladolid, to the north of Madrid. The violent, feverish heat of the Spanish summer, and the red dust that filled the air of the narrow, shuttered streets were a far cry from the marshy flatlands of Norfolk. Many Englishmen, in the four years since Robert Persons first suggested the foundation of the college, had succumbed to disease and death in these unaccustomed conditions. Nicholas Owen’s youngest brother Walter had arrived in Valladolid fresh from Reims and had been newly ordained a deacon in October 1590. A year later he was dead, aged just twenty-three. But it seemed the extreme climate of Valladolid was no deterrent to those young men arriving ‘faster out of England than their rooms can be made ready’. Like its Reims and Roman counterparts, the Spanish seminary had no shortage of students willing ‘to stand and die in the Catholic cause’. What it needed now was a protomartyr of its own.11