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

by Hogge, Alice

  For a start the old order was changing. Catholics had always held that it was Elizabeth’s ministers who were responsible for the worst of the laws against them, rather than Elizabeth herself; now those same ministers were elderly men advancing haltingly towards their graves. Leicester had died in September 1588, Sir Francis Walsingham in 1590; 1596 saw the death of one of the most prominent of the hardline Protestants in Elizabeth’s Government, Sir Francis Knollys; and, even as Gerard rode north, the chief architect of Elizabeth’s reign, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, was fading. He died on 4 August 1598, aged seventy-eight. Elizabeth responded ‘grievously, shedding of tears’.15

  There had been another death too. Richard Young, chief magistrate of Middlesex, had been called out ‘one rainy night [in November 1594], at two or three o’clock…to make search of some Catholic houses’. John Gerard described the event with little regret: ‘The effort left him exhausted: he became ill, contracted consumption and died.’* And not dead, but fallen from grace, was Richard Topcliffe, Elizabeth’s priest-hunter in chief.16

  Topcliffe’s career had always been marred by incident. In the early 1580s he had quarrelled sufficiently violently with the Lord Chief Justice, Sir Christopher Wray, for it to be recorded in the State papers. In January 1585 there were reports of a scuffle between Topcliffe and one of the Earl of Shrewsbury’s men, taking place near Temple Bar. But by 1594 the priest-hunter had begun to overreach himself. In November that year he sued a young man named Thomas Fitzherbert in the Court of Chancery for money he claimed Fitzherbert refused to pay him. Henry Garnet recounted the proceedings to Persons: ‘Topcliffe and Tom Fitzherbert pleaded hard in the chancery this last week. For whereas Fitzherbert had promised, and entered into bonds, to give 5000 [pounds] unto Topcliffe if he would prosecute his father and uncle to death…Fitzherbert pleaded that the conditions were not fulfilled.’ His father had ‘died naturally’, albeit in the Tower and under suspicion of treason, while his uncle was still alive and well and in prison. A witness came forward to tell the court of the ‘devices’ set to entrap the pair and Attorney General Coke testified that ‘Topcliffe had sought to inform against them contrary to all equity and conscience.’ The matter was put over for ‘secret hearing’, but the outcome went unrecorded. Whatever it was, it did little to improve Topcliffe’s temper. Around Easter the following year he made a series of unspecified allegations against Lord Keeper Puckering, accusing several Councillors of bribery into the bargain, and was led off to the Marshalsea for contempt of court.17

  From prison he wrote bitterly to Elizabeth, on ‘Good or Evil Friday, 1595’, outlining the ignominy of his current position.

  ‘I have helped more traitors [to Tyburn] than all the noblemen and gentlemen of the court, your councillors excepted. And now by disgrace I am in fair way and made apt to adventure my life every night to murderers, for since I was committed, wine in Westminster hath been given for joy of that news…and it is like that the fresh dead bones of Father Southwell at Tyburn and Father Walpole at York, executed both since Shrovetide, will dance for joy; and now at Easter, instead of a Communion, many an Alleluia will be sung of priests and traitors in prisons, and in lady’s cloisters for Topcliffe’s fall’.18

  Though he would be released after only a few weeks, the incident marked the beginning of the end for him. In 1597 he was one of the panel appointed to investigate Ben Jonson and Thomas Nashe’s satirical play The Isle of Dogs (their findings closed all the London theatres for a time and saw both authors arrested on charges of sedition). In 1598 he hunted down his last victim, the Franciscan, Father John Jones; Jones was executed at Southwark on 12 June that year, the first priest to be killed in London since Robert Southwell three years before. Here the butchery ends. Soon afterwards Topcliffe retired to the country, to Somerby and to Padley Hall, the ‘delightful solitary place’ he had succeeded in winning from Thomas Fitzherbert. His last years were spent complaining of lameness and he died in December 1604, aged seventy-three. He left the tenancy of his farm at Heapham to his bailiff and the rest of his possessions to his son Charles, apart from a doublet, a cloak, a load of wood, and half a deer, shared between the two witnesses to his will and three local acquaintances. His legacy to England’s Catholics was considerably greater.19

  There remains one twist to the priest-hunter’s tale. In September 1591 the seminarian Thomas Pormont had been caught reconciling a townsman of London near St Paul’s Cathedral. Pormont was taken to Topcliffe’s Westminster house for questioning. He was brought to trial in February 1592 and executed on the twenty-first of that month on the site of his arrest. Before he died he smuggled out of prison a record of his interrogation, which soon found its way into Council hands. According to this transcript, Topcliffe had allegedly offered Pormont his liberty if he would confess to being the Archbishop of Canterbury’s bastard son. But it is the references to Queen Elizabeth that make the most curious reading:

  Item Topcliffe told (unto the said priest) that he was so [manuscript torn] familiar with her majesty that he many times putteth [ms torn] between her breasts and paps [nipples] and in her neck. That he hath not only seen her legs and knees […] with his hands above her knees. That he hath felt her belly, and said unto her majesty that she h[ath] the softest belly of any woman kind. That she said unto him: ‘Be not these the arms, legs and body of King Henry?’ To which he answered: ‘Yea’. That she gave him (for a favour) a white linen hose wrought with white silk etc. That he is so familiar with her that when he pleaseth to speak with her he may take her away from any company, and that she [is] as pleasant with every one that she doth love. That he did not care for the Council, for that he had his authority from her Majesty.20

  Witnesses to Pormont’s execution reported that the priest ‘was enforced to stand in his shirt almost two hours upon the ladder in Lent time upon a very cold day’, while Topcliffe urged him to deny his allegations. Pormont refused. The Council seems to have maintained an embarrassed silence about the claims. It seems highly unlikely anyone told the Queen.21

  North of the River Nene, over the county border from Bedfordshire into Northamptonshire, stood Irthlingborough Manor, belonging to the Vaux family. The house was in a ruinous state, ‘old and tumble-down’, a victim of old Lady Vaux’s liberality, it was said, and of recusancy fines. Four miles to the west, near the town of Wellingborough, was the Vaux family’s principal seat of Harrowden Hall, in the village of Great Harrowden. It, too, was ‘dilapidated’ and, in parts, ‘almost…a ruin’. Devotion to their faith had cost the Vauxs dear.* 22

  Devotion to her dead husband was costing Elizabeth Vaux, Gerard’s newest hostess, even dearer. George Vaux (younger brother of Anne and Henry) had died in 1594, leaving six children under the age of seven and a wife so distraught ‘that she hardly moved out of her room for a whole year’, recorded Gerard. Even then, she was unable ‘to bring herself to enter the wing of the house in which her husband had died’. The Jesuit’s first task as the family’s resident priest was to ease this distress. ‘By degrees’, he wrote, ‘I healed my hostess’s excessive sorrow. I told her our grief for the dead should be tempered; we were not to mourn like men who had no hope. Her husband, I pointed out, had become a Catholic before he died, and a single prayer would do him more good than many tears…So I gradually brought her round to turn her old sorrow into a sorrow of another and nobler kind.’ This new sorrow, for the godless state of the nation, translated itself into practical action: swearing vows of chastity and poverty, Elizabeth Vaux now dedicated her life to the Catholic cause. ‘She was ready’, reported Gerard, ‘to set up house wherever and in whatever way I judged best for our needs.’ With Gerard advising and Nicholas Owen assisting, Elizabeth Vaux moved her young family the short distance from Irthlingborough back to Great Harrowden, scraping together sufficient funds to extend the existing hall by a new three-storey block with custom-built hiding places, to serve as Gerard’s headquarters. It was to be his base for his remaining years on the mission.23


  Harrowden Hall stood at one corner of a pronounced Northamptonshire Catholic triangle, with Rushton Hall, belonging to the Treshams, 10 miles to its north, and Ashby St Ledgers, belonging to the Catesbys, 28 miles to its west. All three families were related; all three had undertaken, back in 1585, to support the mission financially; more specifically, all three had played host to the first English Jesuits, Persons and Campion. In November 1581 Lord Vaux, Sir Thomas Tresham, and Sir William Catesby appeared before the Star Chamber for refusing to state under oath whether Campion had stayed with them; they were all committed to the Fleet prison. This was the world of entrenched Catholic loyalism that John Gerard had entered and now he set off on a tour of these neighbouring households and the surrounding counties. One of his most prominent converts from the period was Sir Everard Digby of Gayhurst in north Buckinghamshire. Digby was a courtier and a Gentleman Pensioner, one of Elizabeth’s official escorts on State occasions. Away from Court, wrote Gerard, ‘he had no interest apart from his hounds and hawks’, so it was small wonder the pair should have become friends: Gerard describes him as his brother ‘in blood’. With Gerard’s encouragement, Digby and his wife now took in the Jesuit Father John Percy as their family confessor.* 24

  It is likely that Gerard also used this time to set up a secret press in the area, though he, himself, leaves no record of it. The clue is an English translation of an Italian book, The Spiritual Conflict, by Lorenzo Scupoli, dated 1598: the translator was John Gerard, the printer, Henry Owen, brother of Nicholas Owen. Henry was the fourth and final Owen boy to join the Catholic underground. His early years were spent as an apprentice to Joseph Barnes, founder of Oxford University Press.* Then the trail goes cold until, in 1595, he turns up in the Clink prison, alongside Gerard; while there, he ran ‘a press and printed divers popish books’. He was transferred to the nearby White Lion prison—a former inn on the east side of Borough High Street—from which he promptly escaped. Again his trail goes cold until, in 1600, he appears in Northamptonshire, printing Catholic texts; such was the information Sir Robert Cecil received in May that year. That John Gerard was supporting him seems highly probable.25

  Over the years, news of Gerard’s supposed activities continued to reach the Government. William Atkinson, a renegade priest, wrote to Cecil c.1602, saying, ‘It is credibly reported that Mr John Gerard, Fisher [Fr John Percy] and Litstar [Fr Thomas Lister] are to be hunting in Beskwood Park…and they were determined to go to the Lady Markham, Sir Griffin Markham’s wife, and likewise to Francis Tresham; young Vaux…was to accompany them.’ Beskwood was a royal hunting lodge in Sherwood Forest, of which Sir Griffin Markham was the keeper. Other reports had Gerard disguised, ‘with an artificial beard and periwig of a brown colour’, back in London and en route to Ireland. ‘His beard’, added this informant, with an eye for detail, ‘is very long cut after the spade fashion.’ This fragment joined the growing body of paperwork on the elusive Jesuit, in particular two descriptions of him, dating from soon after his escape from the Tower and from August 1601 respectively. The first was Topcliffe’s:

  ‘John Gerard the Jesuit is about 30 years old Of a good stature somewhat higher then Sir Tho Layton and upright in his pace and countenance, somewhat staring in his look or Eyes, Curled hair by Nature & blackish & apt not to have much hair of his beard. I think his nose somewhat wide and turning Up, Blubbered Lips turning outward, Especially the over Lips most Upwards towards the Nose[.] Curious in speech If he do now continue his custom And in his speech he flowereth & smiles much and a faltering or Lisping, or doubling of his Tongue in his speech’.

  The second, from the spy William Byrd, portrayed Gerard as ‘high shouldered, especially when his cope is on his back, black haired, and of complexion swarthy, hawk nosed [and] high templed’. And Richard Bancroft, Bishop of London, completed the picture, notifying Cecil in April 1603 that ‘Mr Gerard is a tall black man, very gallant in apparel, and being attended with two men and a foot boy is exceedingly well horsed.’26

  It was a rare luxury for the Government to be in possession of so many descriptions of a single man. A letter from Sir William Cecil to Sir Francis Walsingham, written at the height of the search for the Babington plotters, revealed just how inadequate such information could often be. Coming across members of the local militia patrolling the outskirts of a village, Cecil had asked them why they were watching. They replied, ‘To take three young men.’ How would they recognize the men? asked Cecil. ‘One of the parties hath a hooked nose,’ was the unhelpful response. Yet despite fresh intelligence that Gerard was staying with the Countess of Arundel, and an offer from one informant to betray the Jesuit for the sum of a hundred pounds, he remained at large.27

  One episode Gerard recounts from this period serves as a useful introduction to the messy and confusing conflict that by now was raging between the missionaries. Some time c.1602 Gerard was approached by Henry Hastings, grandson of the Earl of Huntingdon and a first cousin of Elizabeth Vaux. Hastings was keen to study the Spiritual Exercises. Gerard asked him what had prompted his interest and Hastings answered: ‘I read in a book written against the Society that you use this means to persuade people to enter the religious life and then rob them of their property. Among other names mine was mentioned…As they have calumniated you so badly I am come to redress their lies.’ Hastings was rare in his unwillingness to believe everything he was reading about the Jesuits. Many were not so discriminating.28

  To set the scene one needs to turn to two rather different locations, the first, Rome, the second, Wisbech Castle near Ely, in England’s fenlands. In Rome, the centre of disturbance was the English College. There had always been trouble among the students there; as Robert Persons described it to Henry Garnet, the college seemed ‘from the beginning to have had a certain infelicity following it’. The first rector, Welshman Maurice Clenock, had been accused of favouring his fellow countrymen over the Englishborn students, sparking off an early rebellion. At the students’ request, the college was given over to the Jesuits to run, with the Italian Alphonsus Agazzari appointed rector in 1579. But, continued Persons to Garnet, despite this change, Rome seemed to draw men ‘more heady…and less tractable than others brought up at home’.* Clenock might have gone, but the accusations that followed were all too familiar: now the Jesuits were charged with favouring the more able students, seducing them into the Society and posting them around the world on other, safer missions, while sending the less able, the disposable, home to die at Tyburn. Unfair, was the cry that echoed through the college corridors. It was a cry that was heard back in London. Ever attuned to signs of discord among its opposition the English Government acted quickly, recruiting Solomon Aldred, a former tailor living in Rome, to stir up dissent. His brief, as revealed in a letter to Francis Walsingham dated March 1586, was ‘to set a faction’ between Robert Persons and William Allen, creating open conflict between the Jesuits and the seminary priests. In part he was devastatingly successful. Though Persons and Allen remained undivided, there were among the seminary students many willing to listen to stories of Jesuit cruelty, favouritism, and deceit. And not just among the students either: Dr Humphrey Ely, one of the foremost of the Catholic clergy in exile, was soon complaining about rumours of Jesuit espionage in Rome. ‘Nothing is so contrary to an Englishman’s nature,’ he thundered, ‘as to be betrayed by him whom he trusted. If such spies were in Oxford…they would be plucked to pieces.’ By February 1595 Robert Cecil was receiving reports that Jesuit rule at the college was so precarious ‘as a little help would dissolve it’.29

  Back in Wisbech, conditions were no better. The castle’s birth as a Catholic internment camp dated from the late 1570s.* By the mid-1590s it was packed with priests, including the Jesuit Father William Weston, Garnet’s predecessor as Superior, and in this atmosphere of enforced idleness differences quickly arose between inmates: the same month that Jesuit rule in Rome was reported as being so precarious, Weston was charging some of his fellow prisoners with ‘whoring, drunkenn
ess, and dicing’. Soon a group of eighteen priests had banded together in pursuit of stricter discipline and had written to Henry Garnet, begging that Weston be appointed their Superior. Garnet, fully aware that a Jesuit had no right of authority over non-Jesuits, wrote back suggesting Weston become their spiritual adviser rather than their Superior and accept the title of ‘Agent’ from them. This, though, was sufficient to enrage some among the seminary priests who complained the Society was getting above itself, and now the Wisbech prisoners split into factions, each demanding separate quarters, separate tables in the refectory, an entirely separate existence in fact.30

  That such tensions should ever have arisen was not surprising: there existed significant differences between the Jesuits and the seminary priests that, fissure-like, were always going to be vulnerable to applied pressure. And pressure was one thing in abundant supply on the mission. For a start, the Jesuits were a religious order akin to the Franciscans, Dominicans, and Benedictines, while the seminary priests belonged to the secular clergy—and the latter had long held the trenchant view that the religious should mind their own, preferably monastic business and leave ministering to the laity to them.* Next, the Jesuits were a new order, born out of the Counter-Reformation and unburdened by a cumbersome heritage or a long-established hierarchy. The seminary priests were the heirs and successors to the traditions of the English Catholic Church and were bound by its legacy. Both these factors pointed to areas of potential ecclesiastical conflict between the two sides. But there was one further difference that, in the context of the English mission, chased this conflict out into a more worldly arena. The Jesuits were an international order with specific links to Italy, through their allegiance to the Pope, and to Spain, through their founder. The seminary priests were exclusively English.