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

by Hogge, Alice

  In a paper addressed to the Privy Council Topcliffe wrote: ‘The examinee was sent to England by the Pope and by the Jesuit, Persons, on a political mission to pervert the Queen’s loyal subjects and to seduce them from the Queen’s allegiance.’ Then Gerard was allowed to write his defence: ‘I am forbidden to meddle in State affairs and I have never done and never will. My endeavour has been to bring back souls to the knowledge and love of their Creator, to make them live in due obedience to God’s laws and man’s, and I hold this last to be a matter of conscience.’ The lines had been drawn for the conflict ahead.7

  Gerard spent three months in the Poultry Counter. During this time Nicholas Owen and Gerard’s servant Richard Fulwood (captured during the raid on Golden Lane) were pumped for information. Again, there are no official records of these examinations, nor is it clear where Nicholas Owen was being held, but Fulwood was now a prisoner in that former royal residence, turned notorious house of correction, the Bridewell.8

  The Bridewell, sprawled between the eastern end of Fleet Street and the Thames, was unique among London’s lock-ups. In 1553 Edward VI had given the palace to the City as an experimental workhouse for vagrants, to be run according to theories of poor relief coming from the Continent. Inmates were to be taught new skills such as weaving and spinning, and subjected to violent punishment so as to prevent them falling ‘into that filthy puddle of idleness which [is] the mother…[of] all mischief’. With regular floggings, it was felt, the vagabond, drunkard and prostitute could learn again to ‘walk in that fresh field of exercise which is the guider and begetter of all wealth, virtue and honesty’. So infamous had the prison become in its short life span that soon prisoners were being sent to the Bridewell simply to force confessions from them. Fulwood’s internment there revealed the extent to which the Government was eager to proceed swiftly against Gerard, an eagerness that would explain why—according to the Jesuit—both Owen and Fulwood were now tortured. ‘For three hours on end (I think)’, wrote Gerard, they ‘were hung up with their arms pinned in irons rings and their bodies suspended in the air.’ Neither man revealed a single name—either of the places Gerard had stayed in, or of the people who had assisted him.9

  John Frank, though, was busy revealing everything he knew. From Gerard’s betrayer came the information that Fulwood was Gerard’s servant and had written to him from prison. About Gerard, Frank knew that he was a Jesuit who went by the aliases Tanfield and Staunton, that he was instrumental in smuggling Catholics over to the Continent (namely Jane and Bridget Wiseman, William Wiseman’s sisters) and that he had been present at Broadoaks during the search that April. Against the Wisemans, Frank offered still more damaging testimony. For the first time the Council now learned the full details of the North End raid on the Widow Wiseman’s house: that the priest, Father Brewster, had been hidden in the chimney during the search and then spirited away to Broadoaks by one of William Wiseman’s servants. William Wiseman, himself, was frequently seen by Frank in Gerard’s company, notably at Frank’s own London house. As for Nicholas Owen, he had been at Broadoaks over Christmas 1592, he was known as Little John and he wore a cloak belonging to Wiseman. This cloak was of ‘sad green cloth with sleeves,’ added Frank, ‘caped with tawny velvet and little gold strips’. It was on such detail that the balance of a man’s life might hang: at Gerard’s next interrogation he was asked to try on a suit of clothes discovered at Broadoaks and said (correctly) to be his. A positive identification would have been sufficient to indict William Wiseman with harbouring. Gerard vehemently disowned the suit.10

  Though Frank had placed Nicholas Owen at Broadoaks a year and a half before his arrest, and though Owen was clearly familiar with Gerard, neither amounted to a capital offence. Under torture Owen had revealed nothing incriminatory. Probably he had come across as a minor player on the mission: part carpenter, part servant, in no ways vital to the infrastructure of Catholic resistance. Certainly, no one was yet aware of his status. Had Frank known that the Broadoaks hides were Owen-built he would have said so, among the welter of other detail he provided. Consequently, Owen was bound over in prison until, at an unspecified date, bail was purchased on his behalf. If the Government had no use for him, then the Catholic families of England assuredly did. Therefore, wrote Gerard, some ‘gentlemen…paid down a sum of money and had him released’. Owen returned to Henry Garnet’s service. Gerard returned to the interrogation room.11

  By the summer of 1594 it was clear his inquisitors were making little headway. In Gerard’s words, ‘only my priesthood could be proved against me’. Now his friends stepped in to try to improve the conditions in which he was being held. They ‘achieved this’, wrote Gerard, ‘by bribing no less person than [Richard] Young himself’. On 6 July Gerard was led out from the Poultry Counter, over London Bridge to the teeming streets and narrow lanes of Southwark, to the Clink prison on Clink Street, tucked in between the Bishop of Winchester’s palace and a row of former brothels. ‘I looked on this change to the Clink as a translation from Purgatory to Paradise,’ Gerard recorded.12

  Sixteenth century prisons—the Bridewell excepted—were places of detention not reform, packed with a rich cross-section of society, some post-trial, some pre-trial, some unlikely ever to see trial; all too many prisoners succumbed to disease in the cramped conditions. And sixteenth century prisons were more cramped than most. Enclosure—the practice, popular during the first half of the century, whereby estate owners consolidated large stretches of open field for extensive agricultural use—had chased the poor from the land and into vagrancy. The dissolution of the monasteries had chased a host of monks, clerks and charity-seekers out to join them. And one solution to this growing problem was to clap them all in prison. Later they were joined there by all those whom the extravagance of Gloriana’s golden age had driven into mounting debt and all those whose religious beliefs had placed them in opposition to the Established Church. Vagabonds, debtors and Catholics now made up the majority of the prison population.* 13

  The Clink, Gerard’s new home, was a Catholic hothouse. After just a few months, he wrote, ‘we had, by God’s grace, everything so arranged that I was able to perform there all the tasks of a Jesuit priest, and provided only I could have stayed on in this prison, I should never have wanted to have my liberty again’. Through a hole in his cell wall, covered over with a picture, Gerard was passed paper, pen and ink, with which to write to Henry Garnet, informing the Superior of all that had taken place during his interrogations. Through this same hole he was also able to make confession and receive the holy sacrament. His solitary confinement was not long lasting. Soon some Catholics in the prison had fashioned a key for his cell door and Gerard was free to roam. From nine o’clock at night, when the prisoners were locked into their cells, until the following morning, when the warders returned to check no one had escaped, Gerard had the run of the gaol, joining all those other Catholic prisoners who had also made keys to their cells. His next step was to win over his gaoler.14

  It is helpful to think of an Elizabethan gaoler as something akin to an Elizabethan innkeeper. Both ran a boarding house, both sought a profit, neither received any subsidy from the State: as you passed through the portals of either’s establishment you signed your name in the entry book and reached for your purse. How much you paid, in prison no less than at an inn, depended on what you could afford. Gaols were divided into ‘Sides’, subdivided into wards and further subdivided into individual rooms. Inmates chose their Side according to their social status and their ability to pay: the better the Side, the better the rooms, the more expensive the rates.* Of course, better was a comparative term: Gerard’s room in the Poultry Counter appears to have been situated on the best Side. Bed and bed linen, a light to see by, meals at the canteen (which ranged from the dire to the digestible, again according to your ability to pay) and a discharge fee at the end of your stay: these were just the basic expenses you might incur in prison; and pocketing all of them was the prison gaoler, one eye on
his immediate posting, one eye on his pension. In an Elizabethan prison, money talked. And the head gaoler at the Clink seemed disposed to listen. ‘With bribes and a little coaxing’, wrote Gerard, ‘I induced him not to pry too closely into our doings, and to come to me only when I called him.’* 15

  From his prison cell Gerard now took up where he had been forced to leave off in Essex. Hearing confession was straight-forward pastoral work and soon, wrote Gerard, ‘so many Catholics came to visit me that there were often as many as six or eight people at a time waiting their turn to see me’ in the next door room. Some were fellow prisoners in the Clink; many were from the outside, all quietly taking advantage of the fact that, as Gerard put it, ‘my whereabouts were known and never changed and I could be found without difficulty’.† Meanwhile, with the gaoler continuing to turn a blind eye on Gerard’s activities, a chapel was created in the cell of a fellow Catholic, from which the Jesuit could conduct divine service and instruct those who were interested in the Society’s Spiritual Exercises. By January 1596 Henry Garnet could write to Aquaviva: ‘The work John does in prison is so profitable that it is hardly possible to believe it.’ Crucially, Gerard was now able to take over Robert Southwell’s work as coordinator of the London end of the mission.16

  Southwell’s capture had left a gaping hole in the mission’s chain of command. The majority of newly arrived priests were still pouring into London. The Jesuits were still responsible for dispatching them to safe houses in the shires. Henry Garnet, shuttling between the capital and the surrounding countryside, was stretched to breaking point; and the March raids on London’s Catholics suggested that, for the time being at least, the city was too dangerous a place for him, or any priest, to remain in for any length of time. It seemed John Gerard’s incarceration in the Clink was heaven sent. For just as Catholics in search of absolution were guaranteed a meeting with the Jesuit, so too were newly landed missionaries, all of them profiting from the unparalleled freedom with which visitors, for a fee, could come and go in prison. The ‘majority of priests coming from the seminaries over here’, he noted, ‘were instructed to get in touch with me, so that I could introduce them to their Superior and give them other help they might need’.17

  Next, Gerard solved the problem of what to do with these newly arrived missionaries while a safe house was being made ready for them. Through an unnamed third party he ‘rented a house with a garden of its own in a suitable [but unspecified] district’ of London. There he sent all those priests who called on him, ‘until, with the help of my friends, I was able to get them…clothing and other things they needed, or find them a residence’. He put in charge of running this house a widow, Anne Line, who for some time had been living as a guest of the Wisemans. Line had already tasted persecution on account of her faith: her Protestant father had disinherited her, her Catholic husband had died in exile. She was the perfect choice to serve the mission now: as practical as she was willing ‘to die for Christ’. For Gerard, she was ‘able to manage the finances, do all the housekeeping, look after the guests, and deal with the inquiries of strangers’; moreover, she was ‘very discreet’. With a priest permanently stationed with her—to undertake the personal calls that Gerard, himself, was unable to make—and with Gerard overseeing the entire operation safely from his prison cell, Line’s boarding house effectively secured the London end of the mission for Henry Garnet. New priests now had a fixed first contact, as well as fixed lodgings and a fixed source of necessary supplies; and no Jesuit need risk his liberty to provide them.* 18

  In late December 1594 Gerard was led out from the Clink, back across the Thames to the City, to face his sternest test yet, at London’s Guildhall before a panel of commissioners led by Richard Topcliffe.19

  The question put to him there, the so-called Bloody Question, went as follows. ‘What would you do if the Pope were to send over an army and declare that his only object was to bring the kingdom back to its Catholic allegiance? And if he stated at the same time that there was no other way of re-establishing the Catholic faith; and commanded everyone by his apostolic authority to support him? Whose side would you be on then—the Pope’s or the Queen’s?’20

  Whose side would you be on then—the Pope’s or the Queen’s? This question summed up the English Government’s hostility towards the mission. Moreover, it illustrated the fundamental dishonesty at the heart of the English Catholic position, a dishonesty that the missionaries themselves had done everything in their power—indeed had been trained—to ignore. Because, as things stood in this conflict, there were only two sides, Pope’s and Queen’s; and England’s Catholics were attempting—for dear life no less than for their dearer faith—to pretend there were not. If you were Catholic then Elizabeth was illegitimate; if Elizabeth were illegitimate she had no right to occupy the throne, she was a usurper; moreover, the Pope had confirmed her illegitimacy and had sought to depose her from that throne. Conclusion: if you were Catholic then you must support that deposition. You must support the Pope. Except for two factors, which every English Catholic, missionary and lay person with half a mind on survival now clung to with a fervour born of desperation.

  First, the full extent of the Pope’s powers had always been a matter of dispute. It was an eleventh century document, the Dictatus Papae, attributed to Pope Gregory VII, that laid claim, on the Pope’s behalf, to supreme legislative power over all Christendom, including the right to depose monarchs. It made sense for this document to have sprung from Gregory’s pontificate: at the time he was engaged in a long-running and bitter campaign to stop the papacy becoming a sinecure in the gift of the Holy Roman Emperor. But when, three centuries later, Pope Clement V decamped from Rome to Avignon as a personal favour to an ambitious King of France, it gave the lie to the belief that the Pope was the impartial Father of all Europe.* The history of Christendom was littered with examples of wilful monarchs dictating policy and compliant popes obeying. Indeed, in the hands of a powerful king, a pliable pope could be the deciding factor in international disputes and personal rivalries, brought in to add a biblical seal of approval to a wholly political conflict. In 1521, before thoughts of schism had come to haunt him, Henry VIII had won the title Defender of the Faith from a grateful Pope Leo X, for his attack on Protestant heresy. But arguably, Henry could have secured his divorce and avoided schism altogether had Leo’s successor, Clement VII, not lived in fear of the then Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. Charles, Catherine of Aragon’s nephew, had an unfortunate tendency to sack Rome if the Pope displeased him. Under these circumstances it was highly unlikely Clement would ever sanction the divorce, disgrace and ruin of Charles’ aunt.

  To add further uncertainty to the issue of papal power, the history of Christendom was similarly littered with examples of popes claiming authority over monarchs and monarchs choosing to turn a deaf ear. Even Mary Tudor—‘a person not a little devoted to the Roman religion’ in Sir William Cecil’s masterly understatement—was known to have disobeyed the Pope when he attempted to dismiss her favourite, Cardinal Pole. So though advocates of papal supremacy might scour the Bible for texts with which to support their claims—Dr William Allen was a practised exponent of the art—there was just enough doubt surrounding the subject to admit the flicker of hope offered by the all-important second factor. And this came stamped with the authority of Christ, himself.21

  ‘Render unto Caesar the things which be Caesar’s, and unto God the things which be God’s’: Christ’s response to a situation of potential dual loyalty similar to that faced by English Catholics now. Crucially this response suggested that there was a distinction between spiritual and secular jurisdiction and that Caesar had as much claim on a subject’s obedience as God, so long as each kept to his own sphere of influence. The problem was, with the Pope claiming powers of deposition and with English religion a matter of Parliamentary legislation, those two spheres did not just overlap, they were almost indistinguishable; in Elizabeth’s England there was nothing so helpful as Caesar’s imag
e on the back of a coin to indicate where loyalty lay at any given moment. The Bloody Question was the government’s attempt to impose from the outside, by means of a single interrogatory, a forced separation of the secular from the spiritual. Unfortunately for English Catholics the Bloody Question was unanswerable.

  Edmund Campion had been asked a version of the question back in 1581—did he ‘acknowledge her majesty to be a true and lawful queen, or a pretended queen, and deprived [of her throne]?’—and had had the good sense to fudge the answer: ‘this question depends upon the fact of Pius [V], whereof [I am] not judge’. Alexander Briant, executed alongside Campion, chose the path of theological uncertainty and told his interrogators that ‘whether the pope have authority to withdraw [subjects] from obedience to her majesty, [I] know not’. By May the following year the question had crystallized into its more recognizable form and been put to those priests arraigned with Campion, but still not yet executed. Thomas Ford and William Filby both deferred making an answer ‘until that case should happen’. Robert Johnson gamely attempted to plead the secular/spiritual divide, saying, ‘if such…invasion, should be made for temporal matters, [I] would take part with her majesty; but, if it were for any matter of [my] faith…[I] were then bound to take part with the Pope’. All three were swiftly dispatched to Tyburn.22