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

by Hogge, Alice

  One need only look to the writing of the period to see what the average sixteenth-century Englishman thought of the average Italian or Spaniard. The theatres were full of Italian-set scenes of stabbings and poisonings. Travellers reported that the Italians were ‘hypocritical, close, malicious, encroaching and deadly’. Others warned that if the Spanish landed in England, Englishmen would see ‘the rape of your daughter, the buggery of your son, or the sodomizing of your sow’. But the worst type of all, or so everyone in Europe seemed to agree, was the Englishman affiliated to Italy: the Italianate Englishman. He, according to an Italian proverb gaining popular currency in England, was ‘the devil incarnate’. Most representative of this type were, of course, the English Jesuits—it was a useful belief to foster.31

  For the Government, genuinely alarmed by the Jesuits’ success in England, the more tales it could tell of slippery Italianate English papistry, as peddled by the Jesuits and in marked contrast to its own bluff honest Anglicanism, the more reason it had to press for the eradication of the Society. For those seminary priests already nursing a grievance towards the Society (and aware that its links with the enemy fuelled the Government’s case that Catholics were traitors), the contrast between their own Englishness and the Jesuits’ internationalism served as a possible bargaining counter with the Government. And the coinciding of two events towards the end of 1594 made the playing of this counter almost inevitable. The first was the explosion onto an already troubled scene of the Robert Persons-led A Conference about the Next Succession to the Crown of England. The second was the death of William Allen.

  Allen had held the mission together. The seminaries were his creation, the mission, itself, was his creation, the impetus to persuade the Jesuits to enter the fray against their general’s will was his too. He had made the return of England to Catholicism his personal crusade. His views on how this might be achieved had dovetailed neatly with those of Persons, and since Persons’ flight from England in 1581 the two men had worked together in pursuit of this single goal. Allen and Persons, Persons and Allen: despite all the Government’s attempts to set a faction between them, both men remained jointly committed to the venture. Jointly and controversially committed to it: in the early 1580s they were drawn into a French scheme to invade England and overthrow Elizabeth; for Persons this had placed him in direct contravention of the Society’s founding guidelines, which stressed the order’s nonpolitical nature. By 1587 the two men had thrown their support behind the Spanish Armada, convinced only Spain had the military might necessary to effect their desired regime change. In March that year they compiled a joint dossier validating Philip II’s claim to the English throne through the House of Lancaster. They also drew up guidelines for a document legitimizing the invasion. This document would elaborate on ‘the multiple bastardy of this Queen Elizabeth, her wicked mode of life, [and] the injuries she has done to all Christendom’. It would also point out the advantages to England of being placed under Spanish protection. All this ‘is evident to us,’ wrote Allen and Persons, ‘but the matter must be made more convincing by means of this book’. Finally, Allen, like Persons, had been one of the committee behind A Conference.32

  So it was altogether erroneous to hold Persons, alone, responsible for the pro-Spanish sentiments contained in this text. Indeed, it was altogether erroneous to hold Allen and Persons solely responsible for them: eight years after the Armada’s defeat Sir Francis Englefield, England’s leading Catholic layman abroad, was still writing ‘Without the support and troops of Spain it is scarcely probable that the Catholic religion will ever be restored [in England]’. But theirs were exiles’ opinions, opinions that failed to take into account how war with Spain had hardened both the English Government’s attitude towards Catholicism and English Catholics’ attitude towards Spain. In such a context Sir Thomas Tresham’s ‘unspeakable joy’ at the Armada’s defeat was more representative of the views of his co-religionists than Allen and Persons’ belief that they would ‘with the greatest unanimity’ embrace a Spanish ruler. Allen’s death—on 16 October 1594, aged sixty-two—would leave Persons out in the open, holding the smoking gun of both men’s policies.33

  The year 1595 saw the increase in unrest in Rome and the Wisbech feud; 1596 saw the effects of this poison seeping into the lifeblood of the mission. That August Robert Persons received word from Rector Agazzari in Rome that the rebel English students there nursed ‘such a hatred against the Society that I fear that they would be ready to join hands with the heretics in order to be delivered from them’. And ignoring the fact that William Allen had contributed to A Conference, they blamed Persons squarely for its unpopular opinions. ‘I know not whether they hate the Society more on account of the Spaniards,’ wrote Agazzari, ‘or the Spaniards on account of the Society.’ Meanwhile, a letter of Henry Garnet’s to General Claudio Aquaviva that year testified to the growth in anti-Jesuit criticism back in England.34

  For Garnet these attacks had now become personal. Among a few of the seminary priests, he wrote, he was being traduced as ‘a little wretch of a man, marked out to die, who day and night thinks of nothing save the rack and gibbet’. Worse than that, everything he had laboured for since taking over the Jesuit mission was being painted as self-promoting and hostile to the needs of the seminary priests. It was only a small percentage who complained, he stressed, but their slurs still hurt, a fact borne out by the lengths to which the habitually modest Garnet went to refute them: his letter was a passionate defence of his own actions and those of his fellow Jesuits. One story serves to indicate the nature of these slurs. Shortly before Allen’s death, wrote Garnet, a seminary priest began spreading rumours in Rome that the Jesuits were refusing to assist incomers to England. Many seminary priests were now almost too scared to cross over, but when they did so, and found ‘there was virtually no one to give them help…except our own priests, they were staggered at the man’s story and told me so themselves, scoffing at the tales he had told them’. Then the rumour-monger, himself, crossed over, taking lodgings at an inn in London. Garnet takes up the narrative: ‘It so happened that on the very same day he entered the city, I did too. Before I visited any Catholic, I made for the inn and sought him out in courtesy and friendliness. I could not ask him to come with me, for I was uncertain myself whether any Catholic family would take me in that night. But I had hardly gone twelve yards, when I met a Catholic whom I knew and asked him to have a care of this priest.’ And now, wrote Garnet, ‘we have made this priest our friend’. So much so, he noted, that unbidden the priest had just written a passionate defence of the Society’s rule in Rome.35

  The catalyst for all-out conflict was the appointment, in March 1598, of George Blackwell (ex-Trinity College, Oxford and ex-English College, Douai) to the post of Archpriest, in charge of the still leaderless seminary priests in England. This appointment was Rome’s idea, but the handling of the affair caused more problems than it cured. First, the man responsible for the appointment, Cardinal Cajetan, sought Garnet’s advice, enraging those priests already critical of the Jesuits. Second, when the brief announcing the appointment was published, it bore Cajetan’s name, rather than the Pope’s, as though the Pope, himself, had not officially authorized it. Third, the brief paid tribute to the Society’s work in England, particularly Garnet’s, stipulating that, in view of the latter’s ‘experience of English affairs’, ‘the Archpriest will be careful in matters of greater moment to ask his [Garnet’s] opinion and advice’—further enraging the anti-Jesuits. Last, and most insulting, was the fact that the office of Archpriest, itself, was an entirely new creation, a stunted version of a bishop’s office, with powers to discipline priests, but no concomitant authority to ordain. Dr Humphrey Ely would write angrily of the position, ‘I term it a new dignity…the lowest and basest dignity in Christ’s church.’ Rome’s attempts to spread ‘peace and union of minds’ between Jesuits and seculars had only succeeded in uniting those agitators who nursed a grudge against the Society with those
traditionalists concerned to preserve the hierarchy and heritage of the old English Catholic Church, in passionate opposition to the hapless Blackwell. In June 1598 Garnet would write to Robert Persons, saying that Blackwell ‘doth very well and is generally liked’, but plans were already afoot among some of the seminary priests to depose him.36

  The next few years saw move followed by counter-move, blast followed by counter-blast, most of them characterized by an almost hysterical amount of name-calling, as seminary priests and Jesuits slugged it out. It was as though the decades of pent-up fear and frustration, of living in death’s shadow, had finally found release in an act of violent self-mutilation. And the English Government, looking on, had only to keep the combatants locked together for this self-mutilation to continue. One Council agent, suspicious of the ease with which the mission seemed to be imploding of its own accord, warned that the whole thing was an elaborate plot devised by both parties to ‘gain liberty’. Meanwhile, the Council gathered information on the dispute and waited to act.* 37

  From the moment of Blackwell’s appointment, a small body of seminary priests refused to accept his authority, appealing to Rome (and earning themselves the title Appellants) for him to be dismissed and replaced with a bishop of their own choosing. Subsidiary to this they asked that the English College in Rome be removed from Jesuit control. Rome refused, reportedly under pressure from Persons, and ordered the rebel priests to make their peace with Blackwell.

  Now the Jesuit Thomas Lister, long a thorn in Garnet’s side as a result of his erratic behaviour, put pen to paper to accuse the Appellants of the sin of schism, declaring that ipso facto they were excommunicate. It was a view Garnet, himself, shared—the Appellants were defying the Pope in defying the Archpriest—but Lister’s public polemic fuelled anti-Jesuit feeling among the seminary priests further.39

  Then Blackwell, himself, joined the fray, agreeing with Lister and demanding the Appellants acknowledge their sin and make reparation for it—fuelling the Appellants’ belief that Blackwell was in the Jesuits’ pocket.40

  Meanwhile, from Wisbech prison, one of the leading Appellants, Dr Christopher Bagshaw, was summoned to London’s Gatehouse for questioning. Bagshaw was another ex-Oxford man, a former fellow of Balliol College, where he had studied alongside Robert Persons; anecdotally, the two men had never got on. Now Garnet wrote to Persons, saying he had received word from several sources that Bagshaw was behind William Weston’s recent and hurried transfer to the Tower of London and that he was busy holding secret talks with the Government. There exists a document, endorsed by Bagshaw, that appears to support Garnet’s claim, showing him to have been agitating for the Jesuits’ expulsion from England.41

  At the same time the polemic war intensified. Blackwell was variously described as ‘a Jesuitical idol’ and ‘a puppy to dance after the Jesuit’s pipe’. Robert Persons, for whom the greatest contempt was reserved, was described as ‘the principal author…of all our garboils at home’; he and Campion, the text went on, had ‘so acted as to provoke the queen and magistrates to enact most cruel laws, before unheard of, against the seminarists’. The author here was the seminarian John Mush, formerly Margaret Clitherow’s confessor, who had applied to join—and been rejected by—the Jesuits. Anthony Copley, Robert Southwell’s layman cousin, also weighed into the attack, calling Persons ‘the misbegotten [son] of a ploughman’, who had sired ‘two bastards, male and female, upon the body of his own sister’.* 42

  And now Persons retaliated, attacking Copley as ‘a little wanton idle-headed boy’ and describing the seminarian William Watson (who had also questioned Persons’ parentage) as ‘so wrong shapen and of so bad and blinking aspect that he looketh nine ways at once’. Persons’ book, A Brief Apology, or defence of the Catholic ecclesiastical hierarchy, was an attempt to lay out the case for the Jesuits (Garnet helped correct its factual errors), but its bellicose edge did little to calm the war of words. Neither did the fact that Blackwell appeared to have delayed publishing a papal brief, which condemned the polemicists and prohibited all further publications, until Persons had completed the book. As the historian William Camden recorded: ‘With sharp-pointed pens, venomous tongues, and slanderous books, did Jesuits and seculars fight one another.’43

  Then, in the summer of 1601, Thomas Bluet, a Wisbech prisoner since 1580 and a leader of both the prison’s stirs and the Appellant movement, was given permission to come to London to collect alms for his fellow detainees. In London he was placed in the custody of the Bishop of London, Richard Bancroft. Bluet explained what happened next: Bancroft suddenly brought out ‘many letters and books of Persons…and other English Jesuits, inviting the King of Spain to invade England, as due of right to him, and urging private men to kill the Queen, by poison or sword’. Bluet was shocked and declared the seculars innocent of such treasons. Bancroft then explained that the sole reason for the Government’s severity towards Catholicism was that it believed all Catholics to be ‘guilty of these devices, and all [to be] disciples of the Jesuits’.44

  The precise events of the next weeks are unclear, but it appears that by the end of June Bluet had met with the Council, then the Queen, and had devised a petition for Elizabeth, in which he protested secular loyalty and begged for limited freedom of conscience for England’s Catholics. Elizabeth’s reported response to this petition should have left Bluet in little doubt his request would come to nothing: ‘if I grant this liberty to Catholics, by this very fact I lay at their feet myself, my honour, my crown, and my life’. So it seems certain the Council did not pass her words onto him, for on 1 July 1601 Bluet wrote to John Mush with an extraordinary proposal. He had arranged with the Council, he told Mush, for a party of priests to leave England, under guise of banishment, and travel to Rome for an audience with the Pope. They were to offer the Pope, on behalf of the Government, an easing of the penal laws and the chance to negotiate religious toleration for English Catholics. In return, they were to demand from him a total ban on all Catholic treasons against England. ‘It hath cost me many a sweat and many bitter tears ‘ere I could effect it,’ Bluet told Mush. ‘I have in some sort pacified the wrath of our prince against us…and have laid the fault where it ought to be’: at the Jesuits’ doorstep. Where once the Government had used spies to sow dissent between the seminary priests and the Jesuits, now it was using seminary priests to defeat the Jesuits.45

  In the autumn of 1601, happy their enemy’s enemy was a loyal friend to them, and certain the Jesuits and their purported treacherous dealings with Spain were the sole obstacle to religious tolerance in England, the Appellant priests Bluet, Bagshaw and Mush, accompanied by two others, Barneby and Champney, crossed the Channel to Paris. Anthony Copley would write of ‘the departure of the three B-ees [Bluet, Bagshaw and Barneby] onward into their exile and defence against these [Jesuit] hornets’. From Paris the party travelled to Rome, arriving there on 14 February 1602. On 5 March they had an audience with Pope Clement VIII and presented their demands to him. It did not go well. John Mush recorded in his diary Clement’s uncompromising view that religious toleration bred heresy and ‘that persecution was profitable to the Church’; he also recorded Clement’s anger at the Appellants for referring to Elizabeth as Queen, given that earlier Popes had deposed her. In fact, wrote Mush, all ‘we proposed seemed to dislike him’.46

  Now followed months of painstaking negotiations in which both sides, Appellants and Jesuits, attempted to put their case to Clement. At this point a strange selection of allies came to the Appellants’ aid. First was the French ambassador to Rome, Philippe de Béthune. France had followed the arguments put forward in A Conference carefully—and had no wish to see a Spaniard on the throne of England. If the Jesuits were being identified as pro-Spanish, then it suited French interests to become pro-Appellant, albeit discreetly so as not to provoke Spain, and Mush confidently reported: ‘We are safe [from the Society and Spain] under the protection of the King of France.’ Next was the seminary priest Dr John Cecil, wh
o had joined the Appellants in Paris, probably as their translator for the trip. Dr Cecil’s interest in their cause was as ambiguous as his career to date. Since leaving Oxford in the company of Nicholas Owen’s brothers, John and Walter, he had graduated from the English College in Rome and now divided his time between serving the mission on the Continent and serving the English Government at home. It was Dr Cecil who had provided his namesakes on the Council with their description of Southwell and their details of the Jesuits’ landing sites in England; he had also implicated the Jesuits in the plans to convert Ferdinando, Lord Strange. His motivation in all this, he wrote, was to show how a good Catholic could also be a good Englishman. More likely, his actions were informed by a strong, if unspecified, grudge against the Jesuits. But with him now pressing the secular cause and Béthune the French, Clement seemed more disposed to listen to the Appellants. In June Mush could write in his diary of a ‘favourable audience’ with the pontiff.* 47

  The more Clement listened, though, the clearer it became that the Appellants’ case was built of straw. They could reiterate their demand that Blackwell’s ruling—that they were guilty of schism—be rescinded. They could petition for a bishop of their own. They could proffer the three demands that bore the Council’s stamp: that priests be banned from meddling in politics; that known plotters be removed from the mission; and that Catholics be obliged to reveal all plots against the Queen and the State. But they could give, in return, no details of the Government’s offer of religious tolerance. In June Bluet wrote to Bishop Bancroft in London, begging just ‘three lines of her Majesty’s hand’ to confirm her intentions. Bancroft duly forwarded the letter to the Council, but Elizabeth’s response was not forthcoming.48