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

by Hogge, Alice

  In Oxford, Nicholas Owen’s father Walter had remarried and, despite the fact that all the sons from his previous marriage had joined the mission, was raising his second family in strict accordance with the law. On 2 October 1585, just a week after their half-brother John Owen had been banished from England for the first time for his priesthood, the twins Robert and Elizabeth were baptized with Protestant rites at the Owens’ parish church of St Peter-le-Bailey.* Whether Walter arranged for a Catholic minister to perform an alternative ceremony any time before or after is unknown, but the extent of his particular gamble is reinforced by a glance at the church’s register of burials: Elizabeth Owen was dead within days of her christening. She was interred at St Peter’s on 10 October. Over the years a succession of Owens would be baptized, married and buried at St Peter’s, yet still Walter retained his Catholic faith: in July 1604 he was indicted for recusancy along with his second wife Agnes and his daughter Dorothy. Only now, it seemed, with his children of an age to be self-sufficient (his youngest daughter Katherine was born in the spring of 1590), did he feel it safe openly to declare his allegiance to the Catholic Church.16

  Birth to death: perhaps the dangers inherent in the first had brought the second much closer to home for one half of the population, because in spite of the very masculine nature of the mission, its disguises, deceptions and daring midnight escapades, Catholic women would come to play a vital role in the religious resistance. The Vauxes, Anne and Eleanor, and Anne, Countess of Arundel were just three among countless wives, daughters, sisters and spinsters who defied the Government and kept the English Catholic Church alive. Their legacy far outweighed their actual position in society.17

  Contemporary opinions of women kept little back. As a sex they were held to be ‘light of credit, lusty of stomach, unpatient, full of words, apt to lie, flatter and weep, all in extremes, without mean, either loving dearly, or hating deadly, desirous rather to rule than to be ruled, despising naturally that is offered to them’. Other commentators opined that women were ‘full of tongue and much babbling’. These were views against which Elizabeth, herself, no less than her female subjects had had to struggle. In 1569, eleven years into her reign, as England lurched unsteadily towards an earlier conflict with Spain, Privy Councillor Sir Francis Knollys drafted a letter to the Queen begging her to hand decision-making over to the men of her Council and blaming the country’s current woes on her ‘mild [female] disposition’. Privately he complained to William Cecil (to whom he posted the letter, asking if it were wise to send it to Elizabeth) that ‘if she will needs be the ruler or half ruler herself, my hope of success is clean gone’. Edmund Campion, meanwhile, called upon to debate extempore before Elizabeth at Woodstock in the wake of his 1566 Oxford triumph, was understood to have been overawed at the prospect, ‘until’, or so the Spanish ambassador revealed, ‘after a few moments…he remembered that she was but a woman, and he a man, which is the better sex’. And for opponents to the break with Rome, hope had always burnt bright, right up to the death of the Duc d’Alençon in 1584, that Elizabeth (by then aged fifty-one) might wed one of the many Catholic suitors paraded before her and succumb to the civilizing influence of a husband.18

  Over the years Elizabeth would learn to play her gender to every advantage. Her rallying call to the troops at Tilbury in August 1588, Armada year, was the high point in a lifetime of speechmaking in which the ‘weak and feeble woman’ who occupied the throne was shown to have a will of iron. Indeed, the king’s ‘heart and stomach’ of which she boasted seemed all the more formidable for the obvious disadvantages Elizabeth laboured under as a female. The Catholic women of England would become no less adept at manipulating the male-dominated world around them.

  The mission had efficiently transformed Catholic houses into the religion’s new churches, complete with priests, chapels, vestments and vessels. However, in place of an administrative hierarchy to run them, these new churches now depended for their organization as much on the cooperation of the supporting household as on the coordinating efforts of the Jesuits—and in this domestic sphere women held sway. While the Elizabethan husband presented to the world the public face of his estate, it was the Elizabethan wife who was responsible for its below-stairs, behind-closed-doors private face. And since the missionaries stationed in a house perforce were occupiers of its most private recesses, by default it was with Catholic women that priests had the most contact.

  This public/private division quickly became an important weapon in the English Catholic armoury of law evasion. The Montagues of Cowdray Park in Sussex were perhaps its best exemplars. Anthony Browne, Lord Montague, was one of the many Catholics to have benefited from the redistribution of monastic lands under Henry VIII. Under Mary his career flourished further, but when, in 1559, he became the only temporal peer to speak out against Elizabeth’s Act of Supremacy, it looked certain his stellar ascension was about to come to an abrupt halt. Elizabeth, however, continued to favour him. In 1560 she sent him to Spain as her new ambassador, in 1565 to Flanders in the same capacity and from 1569 to 1585 Montague shared the role of Lord Lieutenant of Sussex with the Protestant Lord Buckhurst, only being removed from office on the outbreak of war with Spain. Even then, he continued to serve his country, acting as one of the commissioners at the trial of Mary Stuart and equipping an army of some two hundred horsemen to ride against the Spanish in 1588. This was all the more remarkable when it was discovered one of his brothers had sailed with the Spanish aboard the San Mateo (he was killed either during the gun battle in which the ship was holed, or when the English overran her).* Montague’s career offered startling proof that it was still possible to succeed in England as a Catholic as long as you retained the Queen’s favour (always fickle) and were prepared to offer a token conformity to her religious settlement. In Montague’s case, this was achieved by making occasional appearances at his local Anglican church. To do so was, of course, a grave sin—the ruling had come from the Pope to confirm it and any missionary could daily remind him of the fact—but Montague’s tokenism bore rich fruit. His estates at Cowdray and at Battle Abbey were soon established among the mission’s most important support centres, both enjoying comparative immunity from the random searches frequently suffered by other Catholic estates. And, it seemed, both were managed for the mission by Montague’s wife.19

  Soon after Montague’s death in October 1592, his wife’s chaplain, Richard Smith, wrote an account of life at Cowdray, as run by the formidable Magdalen, Lady Montague.*

  She built a chapel in her house…and there placed a very fair altar of stone, whereto she made an ascent with steps and enclosed it with rails, and, to have everything conformable, she built a choir for singers and set up a pulpit for the priests, which perhaps is not to be seen in all England besides. Here almost every week was a sermon made, and on solemn feasts the Sacrifice of the Mass was celebrated with singing and musical instruments, and sometimes also with deacon and sub-deacon. And such was the concourse and resort of Catholics, that sometimes there were 120 together, and 60 communicants at a time had the benefit of the Blessed Sacrament. And such was the number of Catholics resident in her house and the multitude and note of such as repaired thither, that even the heretics, to the eternal glory of the name of the Lady Magdalen, gave it the title of Little Rome.20

  To Cowdray’s Little Rome flocked numerous members of the mission, including Robert Southwell, who was probably there some time in the summer of 1590. Later, as Southwell lay in prison, Richard Topcliffe combed the district for evidence against the ‘Father Robert’ who had stayed with the Montagues ‘the summer before the Queen’s Majesty came to Cowdray’. It is likely John Owen visited Battle Abbey (he was arrested nearby in the spring of 1586); earlier he had travelled to Guildford ‘in the company of one of the Lord Montague’s men’. Montague’s pragmatism coupled with his wife’s zeal provided English Catholicism with as near to a stable base in the south of England as it was ever likely to achieve in those precarious times. P
ublic conformity to the state and private observance of conscience, the male and female faces of Catholic resistance, appeared a rational solution to an impossible situation. Indeed, such behaviour was firmly in accordance with Elizabeth’s own views on religion, as stated and restated throughout her reign: that so long as her subjects obeyed her laws she had no intention of making enquiry into their innermost beliefs. Many Catholic families would adopt this Janus-like attitude over the years.* 21

  Elsewhere, though, some Catholic women were being more private still, not to say devious. Agnes, Lady Wenman of Thame Park, twelve miles to the east of Oxford, approached John Gerard (through a kinswoman of hers) with what appeared a common request. Her husband, she said, was a Protestant ‘and though she was very anxious to do it, she could not keep a priest in her house’. Instead, Gerard arranged for her ‘to support a priest who could visit her regularly during her husband’s absences’. ‘I found’, wrote Gerard later, that ‘she never omitted her hour’s meditation or her daily examination of conscience, except on one occasion when her husband insisted on her staying with her guests. Yet she had a large household to keep busy, and she was seldom without people staying with her.’ Lady Wenman’s example, and that of women like her, helped fuel a shift in training practices on the Continent, where seminary priests were soon being taught that it was perfectly reasonable for wives to spend their conforming husbands’ money on the mission, since they did so for their husbands’ spiritual welfare.22

  Grace, Lady Fortescue was cut from similar cloth. Her father-in-law was Sir John Fortescue, Chancellor of the Exchequer and cousin to the Queen. Her husband, Sir Francis, ‘was a schismatic (that is, a Catholic by conviction),’ wrote Gerard, ‘but there was no hope of converting him. He was content with wanting to be a Catholic, and refused to go beyond for fear of offending his father’. Grace, herself, was a Protestant; however, she was understood by friends to have expressed a strong interest in Catholicism, so on several occasions Gerard journeyed out to speak with her. Again, his card-playing huntsman’s demeanour proved impenetrable cover, for when, in his own words, ‘I…brought the subject round to the state of her soul…she looked at me in astonishment—I was the last person in the world she expected to speak in this fashion.’ Gerard quickly abandoned his disguise and explained his purpose. The pair set aside a period of time in which Gerard undertook to satisfy her on all points of the Catholic faith; then he received her into the Church. Next, he began persuading her to transform the family estate at Salden, in Buckinghamshire, into a Catholic centre. ‘It would be a great pity, I pointed out, if there were no priest in a house like this…[for] I had never come across a house in the whole of England where a priest could live so conveniently in secret.’ Brushing aside whatever objections her husband might have had to this plan, Lady Fortescue agreed to Gerard’s request and the Jesuit introduced her to Father Anthony Hoskins, newly arrived from the Continent and in need of shelter.* 23

  If these stories told only of single instances of Catholic women defying their menfolk (and only of aristocratic women at that), then the Government’s response to the problem of obstinate female recusants told of a countrywide phenomenon, spanning the classes. In November 1576 fifty-one Yorkshirewomen were brought before the Northern Court of High Commission to answer questions about why they still refused to come to church. In a number of instances their husbands gave evidence against them. Christopher Kinchingman attested that he had dragged his wife to church by force, George Hall that he had beaten his wife to make her obedient. Many husbands agreed to pay their wives’ fines, but said it would be impossible to make them change their minds. And Lord Mayor Dinley of York was roundly condemned for the fact that, employed to govern a city, he was unable even to govern his household. His wife would prove one of the most obstinate recusants in the area.24

  Meanwhile, in Norfolk, Anne Howlet was being released from prison on a bond of forty pounds, on the understanding that her husband was conformable to the Church and was prepared to persuade her to the like obedience. Whether Mr Howlet succeeded in his task is unclear, but a paper drawn up in 1586 by Sir Francis Knollys revealed the extent to which husbands were held responsible for their wives’ actions: ‘for no man can deny but that the law giveth to every man so much power over his wife, that he may constrain his wife to come to church, and there to remain quietly for the service time’. This being the case, advised Knollys, ‘her majesty should show herself offended with such as do pretend to be good subjects, and yet do suffer their wives to be open recusants’. But it seemed many women were beyond constraint. In Hampshire, when Mrs Pitts of Alton (the ‘most obstinate’ sister of papal envoy Nicholas Sanders) was imprisoned, Bishop Cowper of Winchester wrote to the Council, begging she might be held there indefinitely. Her return to the diocese, he felt, ‘would do more harm than ten sermons do good’. For emphasis he added the opinion that ‘no man whose wife is a recusant is sound himself’.25

  Then, in 1588, the Spanish Armada set sail for England and attitudes towards this monstrous regiment of recusant women began to harden. In February that year Francis Cromwell, Sheriff of Cambridge, wrote to the Council seeking advice on how to proceed against Catholic women, ‘whom he durst not presume to apprehend without further direction’; so, too, did the Sheriff of Leicester and the Earl of Kent. Four years later a memorandum, attributed to Richard Topcliffe, appeared to sum up official feelings in regard to recusant women during wartime: that they were ‘needful to be shut up…as much as men…[because]…although they cannot go to the field and lie in camp (for their sex and shame) yet they want no deceit nor malice’. And in March 1594, as the country braced itself for a new Spanish invasion, William Cecil drew up a list of defensive ‘Considerations’, one of which commanded ‘all men’s wives, being recusants, to come to church’ on penalty of their husbands being interned. That this was, in itself, against the law is a clear indication of the level of Government concern about recusant women.26

  The difficulty was that no matter how much the responsibility of enforcing a wife’s behaviour lay at her husband’s door, justice itself was toothless when it came to proceeding against married women recusants. Since no married woman could own property, she could not be indicted and fined for her recusancy. Neither could a husband be punished for his wife’s criminal acts—fining or arresting him in lieu of his wife was illegal.* The only option left to the courts was imprisoning recusant wives as excommunicates (under the writ of de excommunicato capiendo) until they proved conformable, unpopular since it allowed too many women to assume the role of martyr to the faith, particularly if they should die in prison.† It was far easier to proceed against widows and spinsters: they were entitled to own property and could therefore be indicted and fined for their recusancy with impunity. With fining still the Government’s weapon of choice against Catholics, it is significant that the record books of the period are full of suggestions of how to make husbands financially liable for their wives’ misdemeanours. A 1586 list of Bedfordshire recusant women even went so far as to provide precise details of their non-recusant husbands’ annual incomes.27

  By 1590 William Cecil had set out amongst his new religious priorities a series of specific measures whereby wives could be indicted for recusancy and their husbands compelled to pay their fines, and when Parliament met in February 1593, high on its agenda was the female problem. Immediately, a bill was introduced into the Commons that left little doubt recusant women had become the Government’s latest targets (with husbands seen merely as the cash cows capable of funding their wives’ law-breaking). Recusant heiresses were to lose two-thirds of their inheritances; recusant wives were to lose their dowries and jointures. In addition, all children aged seven and over were to be removed from their recusant parents’ care and given to selected families to raise—at their parents’ expense (such was the pernicious influence of recusant mothers on the next generation). Finally, in a clause left deliberately vague, householders were to be fined ten pounds a month for ev
ery member of their household refusing to attend church.28

  On 14 March 1593, as the bill was batted back and forth between Commons and Council for amendment, Thomas Barnes wrote to fellow exiled Catholic Charles Paget, informing him how little these proposals were liked. Francis Craddock, MP for Stafford, had objected to the generalized clause against householders; Mr Wroth, MP for Liverpool, had identified that husbands were the real victims of this law. One parliamentary diarist even noted that many MPs kept ‘special eye…[during the bill’s progress]…that no such thing might be inserted which might wind them with such a penance’. Few men, it seemed, were willing to legislate against themselves. Nonetheless, when the completed ‘Act against Popish Recusants’ was passed that April, although all its other clauses had been stripped away, the remaining clause stipulating householders could be fined for their recusant household remained with all its old ambiguity intact. Indeed, courtesy of the Law Lords, it now contained an added twist. From this time onwards the courts were able to sue a husband jointly with his wife for her recusancy and a host of such prosecutions swiftly followed.* 29

  Whatever the complications of proceeding against women for their recusancy, the law was unequivocal about what would happen to those of either sex caught harbouring Catholic priests. Yet, in practice, women seem to have been treated leniently in the courts. Out of the thirty people who would eventually be executed under the 1585 statute against aiding and abetting Jesuits and seminary priests only three of them were women. But of those three, the death of Margaret Clitherow, in 1586, provided the benchmark against which all other Catholic women considering supporting a priest could measure their actions.