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

by Hogge, Alice

  With no room to bargain, the Appellants could do little else but continue their attack on the Jesuits in the hope Clement might recall the Society from England just to restore peace. Their methods were underhand. Back in March they had written from Rome, asking that a copy of Robert Southwell’s An Humble Supplication be sent to them: this copy, as they now presented it to Clement, was an expurgated version of the Jesuit’s text, specifically printed for their purpose. Gone from it were the tirades against Sir William Cecil and the criticisms of the English Government; what remained were the tributes to Elizabeth’s ‘goodness’ and ‘Princely virtues’ and the pleas for tolerance. With the balance of the book now distorted, the Appellants showed Clement that Southwell, like they, was loyal to Elizabeth, that he, like they, advocated negotiating with her Government, that he, like they, viewed his fellow Jesuits’ uncompromising stance as the only thing standing between England’s Catholics and freedom. The Jesuits were outraged. Henry Garnet attempted to prevent publication of the abridged text; Robert Persons petitioned the Pope, begging him ‘not to allow an undeserved aspersion such as this to be branded on [Southwell’s] reputation and memory’.49

  In the end, after eight months of tortuous negotiations, Clement produced his final ruling on the dispute in the form of a papal brief, which can best be described as anti-climactic. So much hatred, so much invective had achieved so little. For the Jesuits, they had won a ban on Catholics having any further dealings with the English Government to the detriment of their co-religionists. For the Appellants, they had won nothing more than a ruling forbidding Archpriest Blackwell from communicating seminarian business to the Jesuits. Further, a Royal Proclamation, published the month after Clement’s ruling, indicated just how far they had ever been from achieving their hoped-for religious toleration. This Proclamation, issued at Westminster on 5 November 1602, reiterated Elizabeth’s stance against Catholicism, calling on all priests to leave England immediately or face the death penalty. As for those priests, it read, who insinuated ‘that we have some purpose to grant a toleration of two religions within our realm’, God, Himself, was witness to ‘our own innocency from such imagination’.50

  Four hundred years after the event, what remains so intriguing about the Jesuit-secular dispute is not its outcome, so much as the motivation of its participants and the possibilities it raised. It was an unlikely, albeit predictable, coupling that saw Elizabeth and Pope Clement united in opposition to the principle of religious tolerance, but then this was just one of a number of unlikely couplings forged during the conflict. Bishop Bancroft, London’s leading prelate and a future Archbishop of Canterbury, was so active in his support of the Appellants’ publications that he would later be accused (unsuccessfully) of treason by the Puritans, for promoting Catholic literature. It was on a Bancroft-backed press, run by the Catholic William Wrench, that the abridged version of Southwell’s Supplication was apparently printed; Bancroft would later save Wrench from execution for ‘Traitorous’ book-running.* It was Bancroft who produced the papers allegedly revealing Jesuit treason, Bancroft who served as go-between in the Appellants’ negotiations with the Council, Bancroft who (most likely) led the investigation into the origins of the dispute. The bishop was no Catholic, but he was stridently anti-Puritan: the chronicler Lord Clarendon would later write that only an early death had prevented him from extinguishing ‘all that fire in England which had been kindled at Geneva’. His support of the Appellants would seem to have been as much an attempt to consolidate the forces of conservative Christianity against the Puritans, as it was a means of defeating the Jesuits. Whether or not the documents he showed Bluet, setting out the Jesuits’ treasons, were fake, genuine, or the product of inaccurate and alarmist information remains unclear.51

  Also unclear is the extent to which the Council, now dominated by Sir Robert Cecil, Elizabeth’s Principal Secretary of State, was acting independently of Elizabeth in pursuing negotiations with the Pope. Cecil’s had tended to be a voice for peace on the Council. He was not averse to keeping information from the Queen in order to achieve this: he once instructed Lord Mountjoy, commander of the English forces in Ireland, to ‘write that which is fit to be showed to her Majesty, and that which is fit for me to know (a parte)’. If he hoped to oversee a smooth transfer of power from Elizabeth to whoever was destined to succeed her, then it was imperative he forestall Catholic resistance to that successor, resistance anticipated by the publication of A Conference. Indeed, for a time, it seemed, he even considered the Spanish Infanta’s claim to the throne: in 1599 he went as far as to commission secret portraits of her and her husband.* More realistic, though, was the possibility of his securing a guarantee of Catholic loyalty to the Crown in advance of James of Scotland inheriting, a solution that would unite all factions behind the strongest contender in the race. That he continued negotiating with the Appellants even after the publication of Elizabeth’s Proclamation (devising an oath of allegiance for them that repudiated the Pope’s power of deposition) suggests a determination on his part to bring Catholicism back into the fold, albeit in a limited way, for the sake of State security.52

  And this remains the most tantalizing aspect of all about the dispute. For the Appellants had alerted Cecil to the fact that there might exist a solution to England’s Catholic problem, a solution that allied the twin forces of nascent English nationalism and inherent religious conservatism, to forge a new reduced English Catholic Church.† It was a solution that had its echoes in Catholic Europe: in the French Gallican tradition, which had always sought to limit the extent of the Pope’s temporal powers in France; in the reluctance of Catholic rulers to see the Council of Trent’s decrees, emphasizing Rome’s supremacy over them, published in their territories. If the Catholic nations of Europe could chafe at their Roman bit, aware of a conflict between their sovereign right to self-determination and the Vatican’s ultramontanism, then why should not the Protestant Government of a divided country hope to exploit this conflict? The Cecil-influenced Protestation of Allegiance, when it was finally delivered to Elizabeth at the end of January 1603, suggested how this might have worked. In it the Appellants swore to acknowledge Elizabeth as their true and lawful Queen and to defend her life and realm against all plots or invasions, even those carried out ‘under colour of the restitution of the Romish religion’. Here was the answer to the Bloody Question that the Government had longed for, unequivocal, enforceable in a court of law. Here was a Catholic-led movement to limit the bounds of papal supremacy, to place national security above awkward theological uncertainties, to place new England before old Christendom. That this movement was in a minority was indicated by the thirteen signatures, out of some four hundred seminary priests then in England, that the Protestation garnered.* That it attempted to codify the uncodifiable, a man’s loyalty to his God and his country, made its appeal limited. That it would have been stopped in its tracks by Elizabeth’s fear of religious tolerance, no less than by the Pope’s opposition to it, is unquestionable; its timing was not propitious. But its mere existence pointed to a possible way out of the cycle of paranoia and persecution into which England was locked; and, significantly, the Appellants had identified their Jesuit rivals as the main obstacle to that possibility. It remained to be seen what a Government looking for a way out would make of this.53

  In the autumn of 1602 a foreign visitor to court watched the Queen taking the air, ‘walking as freely as if she had been only eighteen years old’. In her seventieth year there were few signs Elizabeth was slackening her pace. On her annual summer progress that year she went hunting ‘every second or third day, for the most part on horseback, and showeth little defect in ability’, wrote the Catholic Anthony Rivers. But witnesses close-up commented that she ‘looked very old and ill’. In October that year she dined with Robert Cecil. ‘At her departure,’ wrote Rivers, ‘she refused help to enter her barge, whereby stumbling she fell and a little bruised her shins.’54

  That same autumn Henry Garnet sen
t a circular letter to the Jesuits in England, announcing Pope Clement’s ruling and celebrating the ‘sweet end of all the controversies which have so long molested not us only, but all other Catholics’. He instructed his men to lay the dispute behind them and urged them to be patient with their detractors. ‘And if with such patience we cannot obtain the quiet which we desire, the fault will easily be laid where it shall in deed be found’: ‘we have a particular obligation to give good example un[to] others’. The letter was a model of calm good humour and tact.55

  Garnet had every reason to feel optimistic. In May that year he was able to write to Claudio Aquaviva that ‘The Catholics are increasing very greatly’. There had been no let up in the penal laws. ‘A few days ago’, Garnet wrote, ‘the Queen rebuked Canterbury sharply and ordered him to carry out real persecution. This, however, was not necessary since they were already proceeding with the utmost severity in all parts of the country.’ But even as the Government was tightening the screw, so the mission was winning more converts. Doubtless this had much to do with a certain theological hedging of bets. Three sets of religious settlements had come and gone now, and each had survived only so long as the ruler who had instituted it. The future of Elizabeth’s Church was no less uncertain. Garnet carried with him papal breves from Pope Clement, addressed to the Catholic laity and the missionaries, commanding ‘that none should consent to any successor upon Elizabeth’s death, however near in blood, who would not…with all his might set forward the Catholic religion’. These breves Garnet had been instructed to circulate on Elizabeth’s death, with the Pope’s authority. Robert Persons was now in communication with James VI of Scotland, backing his claim to the English throne (the Spanish Infanta had absented herself from the race). James, himself, was in communication—through various third parties—with the Pope, expressing an interest in converting to the Catholic faith. There was every reason for optimism.56

  But for Garnet a new anxiety threatened. On 4 August that year he had written to Robert Persons, ‘I purpose about Bartholomytide [24 August] to travel to St Winifred’s Well for to increase my strength.’ St Winifred’s Well, in Flintshire on the North Wales coast, was ‘a standing miracle’, according to John Gerard. Legend had it that Winifred was beheaded defending her chastity; where her severed head fell, ‘a powerful spring instantly burst forth’; her head was then reattached and she had lived on as abbess to a religious house in Shrewsbury. The site of the spring—in what had once been an ‘arid valley’—had become an important place of pilgrimage: Richard I prayed there before the crusades, Henry V before Agincourt. And because the well was seen as medicinal as much as religious, the Reformation had not halted this tradition. Gerard wrote of the healing water: it was ‘extremely cold, but no one ever came to any harm by drinking it…I took several gulps of it myself on an empty stomach and nothing happened to me’. Many miraculous cures had been recorded there and for Henry Garnet, in need of such a cure now, the well had become a place of hope. Earlier that year he had fallen ill with signs of shaking in his limbs: he feared the onset of the palsy and paralysis. At the age of just forty-seven his body was failing him, even as English Catholics dared to look to the future.57

  Elizabeth spent Christmas 1602 at Whitehall, amid great festivities. She had once remarked to James of Scotland that she knew the preparations for her funeral were complete; still she seemed in no particular hurry to take part in the event herself. In January she moved to Richmond and the weather turned colder. On 19 January Henry Garnet wrote to Claudio Aquaviva, asking him to prevent Catholics abroad—and Robert Persons in particular—from responding to Elizabeth’s November Proclamation against Catholicism. ‘If any answer be made,’ he wrote, ‘we wish the Secretary [Robert Cecil] to be spared as much as may be.’ Cecil, meanwhile, corresponded secretly with James and negotiated with the Appellants. By the end of the month the Protestation of Allegiance was ready to be presented to the Queen.58

  At the beginning of February Elizabeth gave an audience to the Venetian ambassador, Giovanni Carlo Scaramelli, who wrote home suitably dazzled by the display she put on. She made no mention of the Protestation, then or subsequently, and soon other events had intervened to displace it from Government business altogether. At the end of February the death of the Countess of Nottingham, Elizabeth’s cousin, turned the Queen to a deep melancholy; ‘she has suddenly withdrawn into herself’, reported Scaramelli. She kept to her private apartments, refusing to leave them and refusing to take any of the medicines prescribed by her doctors. She lost her appetite and was unable to sleep. For days she sat motionless in her chamber, staring at the floor, her finger in her mouth. It was, wrote Scaramelli, as if her ‘mind was overwhelmed by a grief greater than she could bear’.59

  On 9 March an English correspondent wrote to Robert Persons in Venice, telling him, ‘The Queen’s sickness continues, and every man’s head is full of proclamations as to what will become of us afterwards.’ That same day Henry Garnet noted, ‘The Queen is said to be very sick. Arbella [Stuart] is diversely reported of, and is like to be sent up for shortly, to be guarded.’ In London rumours were spread that the Council was stockpiling wheat in case of rebellion; Anthony Rivers wrote of a protective trench to be dug ‘from the Tower to Westminster for defence of the suburbs’. In Scotland James, receiving regular bulletins on Elizabeth’s health, cancelled a scheduled trip to the Highlands. Robert Carey, nephew to the dead Countess of Nottingham and a favourite of the Queen, arranged for fresh horses to be made ready for him the length of the journey from London to Scotland, and sent word to Edinburgh to expect him any hour. From The Hague, Sir Francis Vere, who had just received news that the Queen’s condition was serious, wrote to Sir Robert Cecil, saying, ‘I never thought to live to see so dismal a day.’60

  On 21 March William Weston, in the Tower of London, noticed that ‘a strange silence [had] descended on the whole city…Not a bell rang out. Not a bugle sounded—though ordinarily they were often heard’. On 22 March Elizabeth was finally coaxed to take to her bed. By the following day she had lost the power of speech, though she listened attentively to the prayers read out to her by the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift. That night she slipped into a coma. She died between two and three o’clock on the morning of 24 March 1603. The diarist John Manningham recorded ‘her Majesty departed this life, mildly like a lamb, easily like a ripe apple from the tree’. By nine o’clock Robert Carey was clear of London and on the road north to Scotland and to James.61

  She left no will. She never officially acknowledged that James was to inherit—even to the last she was gripped by the fear of naming her successor—but by now few doubted this to be her intention. Accordingly, at ten o’clock that morning James Stuart was proclaimed King of England, Scotland, France and Ireland, first at Whitehall Gate, then by the High Cross in Cheapside an hour later, then at the Tower of London.62

  When the reports of Elizabeth’s death finally reached Rome they announced that she had died ‘with great reluctance’; some added hopefully that she had died ‘a Catholic’.* ‘God grant the last be true,’ wrote one commentator piously; ‘and the first also.’ Back in London, it took the remainder of that day, 24 March 1603, for any lingering sadness at her death to change to excitement. That evening bonfires were lit and the church bells were rung and their call taken up from parish to parish. Fire answered fire, peal answered peal as the royal messengers rode out across the country. Manningham recalled ‘every man went about his business, as readily, as peaceably, as securely, as though there had been no change, nor any news of competitors’. Of James, he wrote, ‘the people is full of expectation, and great hope of his worthiness’. It was a sentiment widely echoed. All ‘men are well satisfied’, wrote Simon Thelwal to his friend Mr Dunn in Bremen, Germany, and on everyone’s lips was talk of the ‘great hope of a flourishing time’. The Queen was dead. Long live the King.63

  * * *

  * Ferdinando’s chief passion was the theatre. He kept a professional acting c
ompany, Lord Strange’s Men, who performed privately and publicly, at the Theatre in Shoreditch and the Rose Theatre on Bankside. At the latter they are believed to have presented Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, written c.1590, and one of Shakespeare’s first plays, The Comedy of Errors.

  † It seems the Government took none of this seriously: when, the following year, Elizabeth wrote to Derby, as Lord Lieutenant of Lancashire, informing him she was sending troops north against a rumoured invasion, there was little sign in her letter that she regarded him as a traitor.

  * Gerard’s great-great-grandmother was Margaret Stanley. The connection between Thomas Gerard and Ferdinando was hinted at in a report, claiming Gerard was ‘brother to one of his [Ferdinando’s] familiars’. Gerard, himself, makes no mention of ever having had contact with Ferdinando.

  * In a Spanish report of December 1587, detailing the religious disposition of England’s aristocracy prior to the Armada, Henry, fourth Earl of Derby was listed as ‘neutral’ along with the Earl of Shrewsbury. Shortly before Ferdinando’s death, leading Catholics assessed his beliefs thus: his ‘religion is held to be…doubtful, so as some do think him to be of all three religions [Protestant, Puritan, and Catholic], and others of none’.

  † Curiously, John Gerard’s cousin, Thomas, son of the former Master of the Rolls, Sir Gilbert Gerard, also benefited from Ferdinando’s death, becoming governor of the Isle of Man while Ferdinando’s heirs quarrelled among themselves as to who should hold the office. Government of the island had been given to Derby’s family by Henry IV.

  * John of Gaunt’s eldest daughter by his first marriage, Philippa, had married into the Portuguese royal family, from which the Infanta was also descended. John’s second marriage had been to Constance of Castille; his daughter from this marriage, Catherine, had married Henry, later King of Castille.