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

by Hogge, Alice

  Even after a missionary had been stationed with a Catholic family it appears this practice of withholding all potentially damaging information from him continued. The unnamed priest’s report on life in hiding quoted earlier revealed that ‘except when the Superior visited them, [priests] scarcely ever saw one of the Society, or any other Priest’. Isolation, both from the family they served and from each other, was now the missionary’s main guarantee of safety. Even Garnet subscribed to this rule. In August 1587 he wrote to Aquaviva describing how ‘yesterday I accidentally met our Robert [Southwell] in the street…I am altogether unable to tell you what joy this sight gave me’. The more a priest was in contact with his fellows and the more he knew where each of those fellows was stationed, then the more his capture and torture threatened to topple the entire operation.39

  Loneliness was a cruelly ignominious fate for all those now pouring into England, heaven-bent on martyrdom, but it was on these lonely priests in their lonely attics that the hopes of every English Catholic rested. Loneliness was keeping the faith alive.

  There are, though, exceptions to every rule. At the beginning of the second week in October 1591, from all corners of England, separately and in pairs, a party of men converged on Warwickshire, to a small manor house near Knowle, hidden from its neighbours by a dense belt of trees. From Essex rode John Gerard, joining, en route from London, Robert Southwell. From Hindlip Hall, just eighteen miles away, rode Edward Oldcorne and Thomas Lister, and from Yorkshire rode Richard Holtby. In all some dozen or so priests—all the Jesuits then at liberty in England plus representatives of the seminaries of Reims and Rome—made this journey, through woodlands of ochre and amber, through the first wraith-like mists of early autumn.* The timing was no accident. ‘Our adversaries’, wrote Garnet, ‘are engrossed in a general election throughout the kingdom and with devising new methods of persecution’: it was the ideal time to meet in secret.40

  These secret meetings were a biannual occurrence and their purpose was twofold: practical and spiritual. They were forums in which to discuss business and strategy, to plan for the future, to counsel lay Catholics, discipline the wayward and disseminate information picked up piecemeal from the farthest corners of the kingdom. Consequently, they were vital to the mission’s success. As Garnet explained to Aquaviva, it was there that ‘we forged new weapons for new battles’.41

  They were also vital to each individual attending them. None of the Jesuits then in England had been a member of the Society more than fifteen years, none had yet taken his final vows, most were little more than novices. For a religious order founded on rigid training and discipline this was an unsatisfactory state of affairs, particularly given the adverse conditions in which its members now found themselves operating. The meetings provided an opportunity to redress this balance, allowing participants to renew their spiritual vows, to make confession and, above all, to experience a brief sense of community amid so much isolation. As John Gerard explained, ‘I never found anything that did me more good. It braced my soul.’ So twice a year, conditions permitting, Henry Garnet summoned the Jesuits together.42

  It seems certain the meeting of 1591 was held at Baddesley Clinton, a medieval manor built of local honey-grey Warwickshire sandstone, moated and fortified, and belonging, since 1517, to the Catholic Ferrers family. Its current owner was Henry Ferrers the lawyer, antiquarian and diarist, described by contemporary historian William Camden as ‘a man both for parentage and for knowledge of antiquity very commendable’. For four years now, though, Ferrers had leased the house to two sisters, the twenty-five-year old Anne Vaux and the widowed Eleanor Brooksby, two years her senior, daughters of Lord Vaux, the Catholic grandee who had already done so much to fund and assist the mission. The sisters had first begun harbouring priests at the family’s Shoby estate in Leicestershire in the early 1580s; it was there that Henry Garnet was sent on his return to England, while Robert Southwell was stationed at the family’s town house in Hackney, northeast of the city of London. Since then the two women had become an essential part of Garnet’s team of lay assistants and it was in order to provide the Jesuit Superior with a base in the heart of England that Eleanor had rented Baddesley Clinton.43

  On the evening of 14 October 1591 the meeting began. There is no record of the business discussed, but high on the agenda would have been the rumours then circulating the country of a new Spanish-led Armada against England and of the measures that would assuredly be taken against the English Catholics should that Armada sail. And certainly Garnet would have wished to outline his fears of more trouble ahead for the mission after a summer of comparative calm. The ‘peace which we enjoy here from time to time is not due to any easement of the laws or to greater freedom in the practice of our religion’, he would explain, ‘but to a respite that will usher in a period of ever greater harshness’. Each priest then met with Garnet privately and on the final day, 18 October, after High Mass, they renewed their spiritual vows.44

  Until then Garnet had remained calm, reassuring those who spoke of the dangers involved in congregating under one roof with the words ‘Yes, we ought not to meet all at the same time now that our numbers are growing every day. But we are gathered for God’s glory. Until we have renewed our vows the responsibility is mine; after that it is yours’. Now that those vows had been renewed, and as the priests sat down to eat, he grew agitated, warning ‘us all’, reported John Gerard, ‘to look to ourselves and not to stay on without very good reason’. Garnet, himself, wrote afterwards, ‘I know not what inspiration made me address them as follows: saying that, though up to now I had taken on myself all responsibility, I was no longer willing to guarantee them their safety, when dinner was over.’ Immediately they had finished their meal a number of the party saddled their horses and rode away. At five the following morning Baddesley Clinton was raided.45

  ‘I was making my meditation,’ wrote John Gerard, ‘Father Southwell was beginning Mass and the rest were at prayer, when suddenly I heard a great uproar outside the main door. Then I heard a voice shouting and swearing at a servant who was refusing them entrance.’ The house was surrounded, with guards posted on every track leading up to it. The surprise was complete.46

  It was Southwell who reacted first. ‘He guessed what it was all about,’ recorded Gerard, ‘and slipped off his vestments and stripped the altar bare.’ The others gathered up their possessions and hid them away. The ‘beds presented a problem: as they were still warm and merely covered in the usual way preparatory to being made, some of us went off and turned [them] and put the cold side up to delude anyone who put his hand in to feel them’.47

  Downstairs, the servants were holding the pursuivants back, explaining from behind the bolted and barred front door that ‘the mistress of the house, a widow, was not yet up, but was coming down at once to answer them’. Eleanor Brooksby was spirited away to a hiding place at the top of the house; she ‘was somewhat timid’, noted Garnet, ‘and unable to face with calm the threatening grimaces of the officer’s men’. Anne Vaux now assumed Eleanor’s role and still in her nightgown came to the door to interview the search party. She played for time. ‘Does it seem right and proper that you should be admitted into a widow’s house before either she or her maids or her children have risen?’ For as long as she was able, Anne kept the men in conversation on the doorstep: each second now was precious. Finally, she could hold them back no longer and the ransack began.48

  ‘They tore madly through the whole house,’ wrote John Gerard, ‘searched everywhere, pried with candles into the darkest corners.’ Anne Vaux likened them to children playing blind man’s buff, ‘covering their eyes and then trying to touch and grasp’ everything about them. ‘You should have seen them’, she told Garnet afterwards: ‘here was a searcher pounding the walls in unbelievable fury, there another shifting side-tables, turning over beds.’ After a while Anne offered them breakfast, presiding over the table with deliberate courtesy while her servants combed the house for anything incrimin
ating. Then the search continued.49

  Beneath the servants’ quarters, huddled in a narrow sewage channel running the length of the southwest wing of the house, the hunters’ quarry—five Jesuits, two seminary priests, plus two or three Jesuit servants—listened in silence to the destruction taking place above their heads.* The channel was airless and dank and the water from the moat beyond lapped at their ankles. At its highest point the channel measured only four feet, so the men crouched or bent double in the darkness, straining to identify the noises echoing down the former garderobe shaft through which they had entered. Among them stood Nicholas Owen, the man responsible for converting the sewer into a hiding place; between his companions and capture lay a camouflaged trapdoor, covering the top of the garderobe shaft, which itself was concealed within the thickness of the wall. As the search overhead grew more frantic still, as furniture was overturned and panelling sounded for space behind, this trapdoor must have seemed like scant protection.50

  It took a bribe of twelve gold pieces before the pursuivants were finally happy to leave the house.† Still the priests waited in the tunnel, though, allowing the men to go ‘a good long way, so that there was no danger of their turning back suddenly, as they sometimes do’, explained John Gerard. Only then did they emerge from the hide. They had been there over four hours.51

  The raid at Baddesley Clinton had brought home two important points to those involved in it. First, that under the guidance of Nicholas Owen the policy of hide-building was working. In the lethal game of cat-and-mouse being played out across the country by pursuivants and priests, the mouse now stood at least a sporting chance of survival. Second, that the Jesuit network was now too successful ever to be put in such jeopardy again. After the abortive years of the early 1580s, when effort after effort to establish a Jesuit base had failed, there were now nine Jesuits at work throughout England, in charge of a fully functioning countrywide mission; and more were eager to join their number. At a single stroke this network had almost been destroyed. It seems that the 1591 Baddesley Clinton conference was the last occasion that all the English Jesuits met together in one place for many years to come.

  For Henry Garnet the raid would prompt a crisis of confidence and within hours of the pursuivants’ departure he had written to Claudio Aquaviva offering his resignation. He would also admit, some while later, that he had known Baddesley Clinton was under surveillance. Just before the meeting the county pursuivant, a man called Hodgkins, had called at the house. Unhappy at his reception he threatened to return again within ten days, ‘bringing with him a party of men to break down the doors and demolish the very walls’. But word in the district was that Hodgkins was now occupied elsewhere; furthermore, Garnet had been sure ‘he could not come back into the immediate neighbourhood without our friends letting us know of it at once’. It had been a calculated risk to continue with the meeting, pitting danger against necessity, and this time it had paid off, but for Garnet the strain of leadership was telling. He had never been convinced of his suitability as head of the mission. Perhaps he also believed he had just come perilously close to carelessness. Now he requested permission ‘to hand over the torch to someone more expert than myself…and be allowed…to run, not by my own discretion, but under the guidance of others’. Aquaviva refused his assent.52

  Garnet had sought for the mission men outstanding in their piety. In the wake of the raid on Baddesley Clinton—explaining his decision not to call the meeting off and evincing his own piety—he had written, ‘we…had exceeding confidence in God, for whose glory we were assembled’. Confidence such as this was the lifeblood of the mission and for those who had escaped the pursuivants at Baddesley Clinton their ordeal could only add to the certainty that God was on their side; John Gerard likened their experience to that of Daniel in the lion’s den. In spite of their hardships their cause must be just, for providence was showing them so. Piety left little room for doubt (despite the many examples of pious priests, Campion and the like, already caught and killed). Indeed, the history of the Christian Church told them piety was a weapon of unparalleled strength in battles of faith.53

  The problem was their struggle with the English Government was not simply a battle of faith. Each priest executed for treason to the realm rather than for his religion proved it so, representing one more victory for an administration determined to keep tight control of the terms on which this conflict was fought. And as the survivors of Baddesley Clinton rode back to the districts in their charge, the Government was preparing yet another broadside to ensure that its battle with the mission would be played out on political terrain. Against politics, simple piety did not stand a chance.

  * Topcliffe’s father and father-in-law had both come to the attention of the Government during the 1536 Pilgrimage of Grace, the ill-fated Catholic uprising in protest against Henry VIII’s religious reforms.

  * Topcliffe’s connection with the Earl of Leicester came about through his wife’s family, the Willoughbys, who were allied to Leicester’s family. These useful contacts aside, Topcliffe’s marriage was not a happy one, clouded by allegations that he failed to pay his wife adequate maintenance; and the product of this marriage, Topcliffe’s son Charles, spent most of his adult life in trouble with the authorities. In 1602 Sir Robert Cecil wrote to Topcliffe, chiding him for not having had Charles ‘cleansed’.

  † This was not an isolated incident. In late 1579/early 1580 Sir Francis Walsingham wrote unofficially to a number of county justices, instructing them not to ‘persecute’ recusants, ‘for that if you shall proceed therein, you shall not prevail to do that good you desire, but shall rather…fail through some commandment from hence, prohibiting you to surcease in proceeding in that behalf, which would breed no less discredit unto you than encouragement to the papists’. This perception that Elizabeth did not wish the laws to be enacted against Catholics at this period (probably because of her ongoing marriage negotiations with the French Duc d’Alençon) was supported by independent reports from the French and Spanish ambassadors.

  * The Elizabethan spy network mainly consisted of an amorphous body of paid informants, reporting straight to the Government. There was no formal structure to it, but what little there was can be credited first to Cecil, then to Walsingham, who has been called the ‘father of the British Secret State’. It was not surprising that a paranoid age produced England’s first attempt at a secret service. Francis Bacon would note: ‘there is nothing makes a man suspect much, more than to know little’. The practice of paying informants for intelligence produced many dubious results, as a story told by the eighteenth century playwright Sheridan illustrates: an informant was paid a retainer of 1 guinea a week for general information and 2 guineas for serious information; of course all his information was serious. Little is known about these informants, but their letters reveal that the majority of them were impecunious debtors seeking relief from prison. On that fact alone the reliability of their intelligence can be judged.

  * These six Jesuits were Garnet, Southwell, Oldcorne and Gerard, and two newcomers, Richard Holtby and John Curry, who arrived in England in the spring of 1589. Curry, a Cornishman, was stationed in the southwest of England, while Holtby, who earlier had served as Edmund Campion’s guide during his travels through the north of England, was sent to Yorkshire.

  * There were six Walpole brothers in all: Henry, Richard (who became a Jesuit soon after Henry), Geoffrey, Thomas, Christopher and Michael. Geoffrey was the only one who never ventured abroad; indeed, he appears never to have moved far from home, not even to attend university. In 1608, aged forty-six, he married a cousin, Dorothy Beckham of Dersingham, and from then until his death in 1622 he remained at Dersingham. It was his younger brother Thomas who finally inherited Anmer Hall on their father’s death.

  * An unlikely convert in the wake of Campion’s execution was the Jesuit’s former gaoler. According to Persons, ‘The man who had been Fr Campion’s private warden in the Tower of London is now a very fervent Cath
olic, though previously he was obstinate in his heresy.’

  † John Owen was born in 1561, the earliest probable date of Nicholas Owen’s birth. His university career began at Corpus Christi College; then in 1579 he transferred to Trinity. On 1 December 1581 Walter Owen matriculated at Trinity as a college servant, the standard way for poorer students to fund their education.

  * The correspondence between Persons and Aquaviva concerning the Jesuit Thomas Marshall gives some indication of the Society’s requirements. Initially Persons rejected Marshall’s request to join the mission because of a ‘sluggish nature of which he gave evidence’. Marshall pleaded to go. ‘I think’, wrote Persons to Aquaviva, ‘that this good father’s importunity will compel me to let him go to some district in England, in the hope that God will co-operate with his holy simplicity to a greater extent than, humanly speaking, can be expected.’ Aquaviva refused his assent. Later Persons wrote, ‘I am still of the same opinion that [Marshall] is not very suitable as regards talents though extremely suitable in the matter of spiritual zeal.’