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

by Hogge, Alice

  But what made the Supplication so contentious was what also made it so unique. It conceded nothing by way of religious certainties, but it did contain the tacit recognition that if the English Catholic Church were to survive, then it could only do so in conjunction with the present English State, not in opposition to it. It was a plea for lenience; relax your laws against us, Southwell promised the Queen, and you will see how loyal your Catholic subjects are. More radically still, it appeared to accept the right of every Christian of whatever sect to freedom of worship without fear of persecution; England’s Catholics were now ‘too well acquainted with the smart of our own punishments to wish any Christian to be partakers of our pains’. In light of the extreme penalties still being meted out to heretics in Catholic Europe, this was a startling concession by the Jesuit.* Essentially, the Supplication offered the possibility, faint still and barely formed, of a third way, a via media, in which English Catholics accepted the inevitability of their minority status in return for an end to their sufferings. Later, this possibility would divide the mission as surely as schism did England from Rome. For Robert Southwell now, though, unaware of the events he had just set in motion, there was to be little satisfaction in his achievement. It seems he completed the Supplication on the last day of December 1591—this is the date appended to one of the few surviving copies. By January 1592 he was on the run again. And at his heels this time was Richard Topcliffe.27

  Evidence of the vicious searches that took place that New Year as a follow up to the Government’s proclamation comes in a short and atypically despairing sentence from Henry Garnet to Aquaviva. ‘It is not worth the risk of sending [new missionaries]’, he wrote wearily; not ‘unless they are anxious to rush headlong into peril.’ And, in his bleakest appraisal of the mission so far, he cried out, ‘If God does not intervene, all things will reach the verge of ruin; there is no place that is safe.’ Some time in January Topcliffe’s men raided the house of George Cotton on Fleet Street, near St Bride’s Church. Cotton was a cousin of Southwell’s and for a time the Jesuit had taken his name as an alias. To Topcliffe’s disgust, though, the house was empty: on Garnet’s orders Southwell had already left London for Sussex. The chase continued.28

  In Sussex Topcliffe picked up Southwell’s trail at Horsham, staying with his Copley cousins. ‘Young Anthony Copley,…and some others, be most familiar with Southwell,’ Topcliffe told the Queen. Southwell moved on. January gave way to February, gave way to March. The countryside shook off its winter torpor and promised plenty: the last harvest had been good, this one would be better still. Southwell remained in Sussex. There are few details of his movements, but it seemed he used this time to put together his poems in publishable order. And as he circled Sussex, his Supplication began circling London. It is not known how or when a copy fell into Elizabeth’s hands, but a memorial submitted to the Pope some time later revealed she had seen Southwell’s plea; sadly it gives no indication of her response to it. Sir Francis Bacon wrote to his brother Anthony, in grudging praise of their disgraced relative, ‘I send to you the Supplication which Mr Topcliffe lent me. It is curiously written, and worth the writing out; though the argument be bad.’* 29

  In April or May Southwell returned to London. So far his text had not been published—those versions passed around town up to now had been handwritten transcripts only. If he was to carry out the Supplication’s promise to Elizabeth, ‘to divulge our petitions, and by many mouths to open unto your Highness our humble suits’, then a decision had to be made whether or not to go to press. As always Henry Garnet, the Jesuit Superior, had the casting vote. Nothing is known of the conversation that took place between the two men, but it is characteristic of the mission’s veiled and often abbreviated correspondence that the immediate fate of Southwell’s Supplication should only be revealed in a single phrase written ten years after the event. In May 1602 Garnet would tell Robert Persons, ‘Father Southwell wrote a very good answer to the Proclamation, but it could never be set forth.’ Perhaps it was damage limitation, perhaps an attempt to cool off the search for his friend, but Henry Garnet forbade publication. The presses remained silent, Garnet returned to Warwickshire and Southwell resumed his London apostolate. And the most passionate defence of the mission’s aims yet written was relegated to limbo, the only evidence of its existence a few copies passed between friends.30

  On Saturday, 24 June 1592 Southwell recognized a young man named Thomas Bellamy in London’s Fleet Street. According to his subsequent testimony Thomas had just come from a meeting with his sister Anne, at which Anne had been keen Southwell should visit the Bellamys at their house at Uxendon, near Harrow. Now Southwell—who, it seemed, had already been contacted by Anne privately—offered to ride up to Uxendon with Thomas. Thomas agreed. The following morning Thomas met Southwell at a prearranged rendezvous in Fleet Street and the two men turned their horses towards Tyburn and the spur road leading out of London to the northwest. At about the same time a third man named Nicholas Jones left the city in some haste in the opposite direction, heading southeast to Greenwich. Here he would consult with Richard Topcliffe and soon the priest-hunter, too, would be on the move. Weeks of careful planning were now just twelve hours from fruition.31

  Harrow-on-the-Hill, Sudbury Hill, Perivale, Greenford: their names tell a story of heights and valleys, of streams and former verdancy. It was here that the Bellamy family had its estates: the manor houses of Uxendon and, a little to the north, of Preston. In 1581 William Bellamy entertained Edmund Campion at Uxendon. Richard Bristow, academic and one of the original members of Douai’s English College, took shelter here on his return to England, suffering from consumption. Bristow, with fellow ex-Oxford don Gregory Martin, was responsible for the Douai Bible, a translation into English of the New Testament, rivalling Elizabeth’s authorized Protestant version (and an admission by the Catholic Church that the vernacular was superseding Latin in the battle for English souls).* Bristow would die in 1581 and Topcliffe would later accuse William’s son Richard Bellamy of burying the priest in Harrow churchyard under the pseudonym Richard Spring. The family was well known to Robert Persons, who directed William Weston there on the latter’s arrival in England in 1584, certain of his safe reception. Throughout the fledgling years of the Catholic mission the Bellamys of Uxendon would play a critically supportive role. Then, in 1586, the family gave food and clothing to those members of Anthony Babington’s confederacy fleeing London and there the men were arrested. Babington, himself, was run to earth in nearby St John’s Wood. Previously the family had been penalized for recusancy. Now it was to face far worse. Jerome Bellamy, William’s son, described as ‘a very clownish, blunt, wilful, and obstinate papist’, was executed alongside the other conspirators. William’s widow, Katherine, died a prisoner in the Tower of London. Another son, Bartholomew, is said to have died on the rack. Of all the victims of Babington’s criminal lunacy, the Bellamys would suffer disproportionate agonies far above their deserts. They were agonies from which the family would never quite recover.32

  In the post-Proclamation raids of January 1592 twenty-nine-year-old Anne Bellamy, eldest daughter of Richard Bellamy, was arrested and taken to the Gatehouse prison adjoining Westminster Abbey. In a matter of weeks she was pregnant. Her family, when it learned of her condition, was in no doubt who was responsible. In an appeal to the Privy Council Thomas Bellamy accused Richard Topcliffe of raping her.33

  The events of that year come to us over a distance of four hundred years in piecemeal fashion—a statement here, a letter there—and the picture is far from complete. The reported facts are these. Within six weeks of her arrival at the Gatehouse, some time early in March, Anne Bellamy had become pregnant. Soon afterwards she was released on bail, with Topcliffe’s instruction not to leave London. Anne took lodgings in Holborn, unwilling to confide in her family. At some unspecified time and in urgent need of money she agreed to Topcliffe’s demands. His price was steep. In return for taking care of her he asked her to delive
r Robert Southwell up to him.34

  Initially, Anne appears to have contacted her parents and asked them that should Southwell ever visit Uxendon she should be told of it, as she was eager to meet the priest. Later, as she grew more desperate, she began searching for him herself. Her brother’s chance encounter with Southwell merely hastened on an event already stamped with an awful inevitability. And as Nicholas Jones, the Gatehouse under-keeper, clattered into the courtyard of Greenwich Palace that Sunday afternoon, 25 June 1592, it was to deliver a message that had been anticipated now for some three weeks. Certainly that was the length of time Topcliffe’s horses and men had been standing by.35

  The raid of Uxendon Manor was carried out with a military efficiency. Anne had provided the pursuivants with a detailed map of the local area and in the still summer darkness the men had no difficulty in finding the house, or in quietly surrounding it. By midnight that evening the attack was set. When the hammering on the door came, accompanied by the familiar shouting and the familiar racing shadows, it dragged the household from sleep into a waking nightmare. This time there was no need to search for Southwell, no need to splinter the panelling or sound the walls. In his hand Richard Topcliffe held a piece of paper giving the exact location of the hiding place in which the priest lay concealed. Mrs Bellamy was permitted to make contact with her guest—Henry Garnet, who described the arrest to Aquaviva, was unclear how she did this—and Southwell was offered the choice of giving himself up, or being dragged out forcibly. Time slowed. Then, as the household and assembled search party watched, a slim man with auburn hair—such was an informer’s description of him—made his way quietly downstairs and into the Great Hall. Priest and priest-hunter faced each other. Topcliffe demanded of Southwell who he was. Southwell answered, ‘A gentleman.’ Topcliffe replied, ‘No, a priest, a traitor, a Jesuit.’ Southwell asked Topcliffe to prove this assertion. Topcliffe drew his sword and ran at Southwell.36

  It took a concerted effort to hold the priest-hunter back. All the while, wrote Garnet, Southwell watched impassively, seemingly unafraid of what was happening to him. Once Topcliffe had been subdued, the pursuivants turned their attention to ransacking the house for illegal books and massing equipment. This done, Southwell was bound, loaded into a cart and the cavalcade set off slowly back to London.37

  Westminster was stirring as the party made its way towards the Abbey and to Topcliffe’s house nearby. But although ‘they passed through the least frequented streets,’ wrote Garnet to Aquaviva, ‘the report of [Southwell’s] capture had spread already through the whole city’. Southwell was conducted to Topcliffe’s private torture chamber and the door closed shut behind him.38

  For Topcliffe, the next few days appear to have required careful stage-managing. The first letter he wrote was to Queen Elizabeth, informing her of Southwell’s detention ‘in my strong chamber in Westminster’ and requesting permission to proceed with the Jesuit as he thought fit. The second letter was to Mrs Richard Bellamy. If there is any proof that the arrest of Southwell came about as a result of a secret deal between Topcliffe and Anne Bellamy then it is contained here, in this letter dated 30 June 1592. ‘Mistress Bellamy,’ wrote Topcliffe, ‘It may be that I did leave you in fear the other night for the cause that fell out in your house.’ Mrs Bellamy had due cause to be fearful: sheltering Southwell was a capital offence. So Topcliffe’s reassurances to her are something of a surprise. ‘And therefore’, he wrote, ‘take no care of yourself and for your husband, so as he come to me to say somewhat to him for his good. Your children are like to receive more favour, so as from henceforth they continue dutiful in heart and show. And although your daughter Anne have again fallen in some folly, there is no time past but she may win favour.’ That Anne had just been returned to the Gatehouse for having invited Southwell to Uxendon was, it seemed, a carefully constructed smokescreen concealing the true nature of the transaction between her and Topcliffe. And that the Bellamys, themselves, had not already been arrested and incarcerated was, it must be assumed, the result of hard bargaining on their daughter’s part.39

  As for Robert Southwell, Topcliffe summed up the plans for his immediate future in a pungent phrase to Queen Elizabeth. The priest was to be made ‘to stand against the wall, his feet standing upon the ground, and his hands but as high as he can reach against the wall, (like a trick at Trenchmore [a popular dance of the period])’. It sounded an innocuous fate; only the priest-hunter’s contemptuous comments about the methods used in ‘common prisons’ to make victims talk—they ‘hurteth not’—gave any indication of what was in store for Southwell. Topcliffe referred to a relatively new form of torture, the manacles: iron fetters fixed to the wall from which the victim could be suspended by the wrists for hours at a time. Their invention had been credited to Topcliffe himself. If so, it would explain his confidence in their application: the manacles, he assured Elizabeth, would ‘enforce [Southwell] to tell all’.40

  By the end of the first day of torture, though, this confidence had been shaken. Although Southwell had been strung up for several hours, yet still he had refused to answer any question put to him. Topcliffe sent urgently to the Queen, complaining about the Jesuit’s obstinacy. ‘The Queen’, wrote Garnet, receiving his information from an unnamed source at Court, ‘called Topcliffe a fool, and said she would put the matter in the hands of her Council who would soon finish it’. The following day two Clerks of the Council arrived to help Topcliffe with his interrogation. ‘Yet still, they say, “the prisoner remains obstinate”,’ noted Garnet.41

  By the end of the second day, it was clear that Topcliffe, even with assistance, was no nearer getting Southwell to confess to anything. The priest was removed next door to the Gatehouse prison, where the torture stepped up a gear. Now, he was left hanging for even longer periods, his legs bent back and his heels strapped up against his thighs. Members of the Council arrived to question him; Sir Robert Cecil came face to face with his cousin in a dank prison cell, its windows boarded up, the only light coming from a small pane of glass in the ceiling. But still Southwell refused to talk. Henry Garnet, desperate to know everything that was happening to his friend—from the conditions in which he was being kept to the comments made about him—reported one Councillor as saying, ‘No wonder [Catholics] trust these Jesuits with their lives, when, from a man ten times tortured, not one word could be twisted that might lead others into danger.’42

  Meanwhile, Southwell’s father, Richard Southwell, was attempting to secure his son’s release. Some time in July he petitioned Elizabeth directly. By now Robert was in a wretched state, liceridden, still dressed in the clothes in which he had been arrested, filthy, starved and tortured half to death. Such, anyway, were the reports being circled amongst his friends. His father’s plea rang with indignant fury. ‘That if his son had committed anything for which by the laws he had deserved death, he might suffer death. If not, as he was a gentleman, that her majesty might be pleased to order that he should be treated as such, even though he were a Jesuit. And that as his father, he might be permitted to send him what he needed to sustain life.’ Elizabeth granted the petition.43

  On 28 July the Privy Council wrote to the Lieutenant of the Tower of London with the following order: ‘that her Majesty’s pleasure is you shall receive into your custody and charge the person of Robert Southwell, a priest whom Mr Topcliffe shall deliver unto you, to be kept close prisoner so as no person be suffered to have access unto him’. Soon afterwards, with Topcliffe as his escort, Southwell was carried the few miles from the Gatehouse prison to the Tower of London. Here, he disappeared into the stronghold of the Lanthorn Tower, on the corner of the Queen’s Privy Gardens overlooking Tower Wharf, and into a strictly enforced solitary confinement. For the next two and a half years he would remain there, hidden from view. His friends would struggle in vain to receive news of him. His enemies, it seemed, had virtually forgotten him. Denied all contact with the outside world, denied pen and ink to express himself, denied the glory of an
inspirational martyrdom, he had simply passed into oblivion.44

  But while Southwell’s fate still hung in the balance, Richard Topcliffe, it seemed, was more immediately concerned with covering his own tracks. On 25 July, just days before Southwell’s transfer to the Tower, Anne Bellamy was released from the Gatehouse prison. By now she was about four months pregnant. From Westminster she was taken to Greenwich, ostensibly to be examined by the Council, but in reality to be married off in secret. The man chosen to be her husband was Nicholas Jones.45

  From Greenwich, Anne was taken to Somerby in Lincolnshire, Topcliffe’s estate, where, towards Christmas, she gave birth. A month later, on 12 January 1593, Topcliffe wrote to the Bellamys denying all rumours of a hugger-mugger wedding. ‘He very vehemently purgeth her from reports of slander, howsoever slanderous,’ testified Thomas Bellamy later, adding that ‘By a postscript [Topcliffe] writeth, that if any papist Catholic say she is with child, hold them knavish and false.’ The priest-hunter signed his letter ‘Your plain and known friend, Richard Topcliffe’.* In February Topcliffe again wrote to Anne’s parents, defending her honour. The first news the Bellamys received of their daughter’s condition came from Anne herself. In a letter dated 12 March 1593 Anne informed her mother of her hurried marriage to Jones, ‘alleging many reasons thereof’, wrote her brother, though none that satisfied her family’s suspicions. She also confessed she had been prematurely delivered of a baby and she craved her mother’s pardon.46