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

by Hogge, Alice

  Robert Cecil lived on until 24 May 1612. His death, just a few days short of his forty-ninth birthday, was celebrated with public glee and a flood of denigratory ballads. As the letter writer John Chamberlain noted: ‘I never knew so great a man so soon and so generally censured’; but then Cecil, like his father before him, had never courted popularity. Among Catholics he was, and is, blamed for many of their woes. Yet Cecil was not alone in regarding England’s Catholics as the primary threat to their country’s security. Neither was he alone in the methods he chose to defuse that threat: judicious manipulation of evidence, the orchestration of smear campaigns, the singling out of a scapegoat for the nation’s hostility. These were, and remain, practised tricks of government. Where Cecil was rare was in his seeming lack of personal animus in so doing. His correspondence is remarkably free of the ugly clatter of religious prejudice so common at this period. Rather it often surprises with its tone of tolerance, a point that should inform any assessment of his role in these proceedings.

  James survived his principal minister by thirteen years. He died on Sunday, 27 March 1625, aged 58. True to form, his final moments were hedged with rumours of assassination (by poisoning), and his funeral, just as his coronation had been, ‘was marred by foul weather’: ‘there was nothing to be seen,’ wrote John Chamberlain, ‘but coaches and torches.’ James had never had the knack for ceremony.

  He was succeeded as King by his second son, Charles (Prince Henry had died the same year as Robert Cecil). Twenty-four years later, on 30 January 1649, that same Charles was led out onto a scaffold in front of Whitehall Palace and executed for treason by order of his Parliament; during the Civil War preceding this event England’s Catholics had been among his staunchest supporters. Two years later James’s grandson, Charles II, escaped Parliament’s Army by seeking shelter in Catholic houses, all of them equipped with Catholic priest-holes. It has been suggested, though it cannot be confirmed, that the hides in question were the work of Nicholas Owen.9

  It is widely held that Charles II converted to Catholicism on his deathbed. His successor, his brother James II, was openly Catholic. In 1688 James’s Dutch Protestant son-in-law, William, invaded England and seized it for himself, and James fled; within weeks a compliant Parliament had offered William and his wife, Mary, the Crown jointly, claiming that James had willingly abdicated it. In 1701 Parliament took steps to ensure that the succession would thenceforward bypass James’s British-born Catholic son, and fall instead on his German Protestant first cousin onceremoved. The king-killer, the king-deposer was not, it seemed, an autocratic, absolutist Pope, but Parliament, seat of democracy, acting with the cold efficiency of English law. And government by ‘Strangers’, as recommended by Robert Persons in his Book of Succession, and at the time so generally reviled, was now become palatable when advocated by Protestant tongues. William Shakespeare has the phrase for it: ‘And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.’ In years to come a descendant of Cecil, and one of Sir Francis Walsingham, would join the Jesuits.10

  Anne and Elizabeth Vaux escaped serious punishment for their involvement in the events surrounding the Gunpowder Plot. Anne was released from the Tower of London in August 1606, allegedly ‘much disappointed’ that she had not been allowed to die alongside Henry Garnet. Some time later she moved back up to Leicestershire, where she and her sister Eleanor Brooksby continued harbouring priests just as before. She died in 1635 aged 73. Her sister-in-law Elizabeth would also remain loyal to the mission. After her release from house arrest in London in April 1606 she returned to Harrowden, where she quickly installed Father John Percy as resident Jesuit in place of John Gerard. In 1611 an unfounded rumour that Gerard was back in England saw Harrowden raided again and Elizabeth rearrested. The following year she was indicted for refusing to take the Oath of Allegiance and condemned to Newgate prison in perpetuity, but in July 1613 she was freed on the grounds of ill health. She died some twelve years later.11

  Father Robert Persons died in Rome in April 1610, aged 64, and General Claudio Aquaviva in January 1615, aged 72. Persons left behind him a reputation complicated by his involvement in the Jesuit-Appellant conflict and by his repeated intervention in matters seen as political rather than purely religious. He remains an ambiguous figure in the history of the Jesuit mission, admired for his doggedness and zeal, criticized, even by his defenders, for his willingness to engage in polemic and in his back-room dealings with statesmen and generals. Aquaviva’s reputation is more straightforward: he is regarded as one of the chief architects of the Jesuits’ long-term survival and success.

  On about 21 March 1606 Father Edward Oldcorne was transferred from the Tower of London to the country gaol in Worcester. He was brought to trial at the Lent assizes, charged with inviting Henry Garnet to Hindlip and with approving of the Gunpowder Plot. He was found guilty—he was far too close to the plot’s central characters for this verdict to have been in doubt—and on 7 April he was led the mile out of Worcester to Redhill, where, in the company of his servant Ralph Ashley, he was hanged, drawn, and quartered. Thomas Habington, Hindlip’s owner, though also condemned, received a State pardon. He lived on to become a well-regarded antiquarian, dying in 1647 at the age of 87.

  On 15 December 1924 Edward Oldcorne and Ralph Ashley were beatified by Pope Pius XI, as part of a long-running campaign within the Catholic Church formally to recognize its English martyrs; on 25 October 1970, forty of those one hundred and thirty-six beatified martyrs received canonization. Among their number were Cuthbert Mayne, Edmund Campion, Henry Walpole, Margaret Clitherow, Robert Southwell, and Nicholas Owen. Though Henry Garnet’s name was put forward for consideration, the evidence for his case was found to be insufficient to permit official acknowledgement of his martyrdom. Centuries on, the Gunpowder Plot continues to cast a long, almost impenetrable shadow over his reputation.12

  With no obvious word or gesture from Rome in Garnet’s defence—either in the months immediately following his execution or, indeed, subsequently—it was left to various Catholic writers to try to clear the Jesuit’s name, and various Protestant ones to try to tarnish it further. It was a dramatist, though, who is generally believed to have given Garnet his most widely spoken epitaph. The precise dating of Macbeth is unclear, though it seems certain that Shakespeare was working on the text between the years 1603 and 1606. The likely reference to Garnet comes in the one comic scene in this dark and most dreadful of plays. Macbeth and his wife, just come from murdering King Duncan, are disturbed by a vigorous knocking at the gate; a drunken porter stumbles sleepily to answer its summons and as he goes he imagines he is gatekeeper in hell, welcoming in the newcomers:

  Knock, knock. Who’s there…[in the] devil’s name? Faith, here’s an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale; who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven: O! come in, equivocator.

  In the same speech the porter refers to ‘a farmer, that hang’d himself on the expectation of plenty’. Farmer was one of Garnet’s aliases.13

  Playwrights and pamphleteers were among the Jesuits’ most bilious critics in the years following the plot. ‘If about Bloomsbury or Holborn,’ warned one writer in 1624, ‘you meet a good smug fellow in a gold-laced suit, a cloak lined through with velvet, one that has gold rings on his fingers, a watch in his pocket, which he will value above 20 pounds, a very broad-laced band, a stiletto by his side, [and] a man at his heels…then take heed of a Jesuit.’ Another advised that Jesuits could transform ‘themselves into as many shapes as they meet with objects’, to ‘beguile’ the unwary. Seventeenth-century audiences flocked to the Globe Theatre to watch Thomas Middleton’s scurrilous satire A Game at Chess, which featured a host of Jesuit villains (and an Induction delivered by ‘Ignatius Loyola’). Eighteenth-century audiences laughed their way through Oliver Goldsmith’s The Good-Natured Man, with its comic references to ‘a damned jesuitical, pestilential plot’, and through the even less subtle The Wanton J
esuit, in which they learned that:

  A Jesuit is a clever man

  When a maid comes to confession,

  He first does absolve, and next trepans

  And brings her to oppression.

  Then he kisses

  And does all he can,

  To multiply transgression.

  The Jesuits, went the myth, were liars, lechers, and, of course, king-killers. Over the course of its history the Society has variously been accused of plotting the murders—some realized, some not—of one Dutch head of State, three French, four English, and no fewer than five American presidents, including Abraham Lincoln.* It seems only the assassination of the Catholic John F. Kennedy has not been laid at its door. Few other organizations have been so widely despised and in such lurid and hysterical fashion (obscuring both the Jesuits’ extraordinary achievements and whatever genuine censures they might deserve). But then, as Robert Persons reported from England back in 1581, just months into his mission, there was already ‘tremendous talk here of the Jesuits and more fables perhaps told about them than we were told of old about monsters’.14

  The English Jesuit mission continued after Garnet’s execution, riding out the worst storms of the post-plot persecution. The last person to be executed under the 1585 act (making entering England as a Catholic priest an act of treason) was the Welsh Jesuit David Lewis, a victim of Titus Oates’s accusations, killed on 27 August 1679. Thereafter King Charles II, independently of Parliament, ordered that no priest should suffer this fate again. The Revolution in France, a century later, sent many Catholic institutions running from its shores for safety, among them the Robert Personsestablished English boys’ school at St Omer. This took advantage of the first Catholic Relief Acts and moved to Lancashire in 1794, to the Stonyhurst estate of a former pupil, where it has remained ever since. When Catholics were permitted full freedom of worship in 1829, the Society spread freely, building more schools and colleges across the country. In 1896 the Jesuits returned to Oxford, founding a Private Hall there that in time became Campion Hall, a recognized part of Oxford’s university. In a note of symmetry, the Hall’s first buildings were rented from St John’s, Edmund Campion’s old college.15

  Nearly seventy Catholic martyrs from the Tudor and Stuart period came from Oxford University, some fifty of these quitting Oxford during Elizabeth’s reign. This last figure makes up just less than half of the one hundred and twenty-four Catholic priests executed under Elizabeth. Thereafter the university was always vulnerable to accusations of popery. It was purged again during the Puritan Interregnum and subjected to heavy scrutiny in Charles II’s reign. Still, its students warmly welcomed the Catholic James, Duke of York (soon to be James II) on an official visit in 1683, and when James attempted to emancipate his co-religionists during his short reign, University College was quick to open a Catholic chapel. Curiously, educators looking to reorder Oxford’s teaching at this period would pay close attention to the Jesuit schools and colleges on the Continent: ‘the Jesuits,’ wrote one Oxford graduate admiringly, ‘do breed up their youth to oratory the best of any in the world.’16

  Over the centuries the religious checks and balances keeping Oxford conformist remained in place: a survey conducted in the mid-1820s found that Oxford and Cambridge were the only two universities in the world so generally to test the faith of their students. As late as 1854 Oxford undergraduates were still required to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles at matriculation. This did not stop one group of early nineteenth-century Oxford scholars from hankering after the ‘awe, [and] mystery’ of the medieval Church, in the words of their leader, John Henry Newman of Oriel. Soon the group, which would become known as the Oxford Movement, had adopted many of the doctrines and rituals of Catholicism, provoking a flurry of agitated letters accusing its members of ‘designing the reintroduction of Popery’. In time several of these scholars would go over to Rome, including Newman. Later, he would be made a cardinal, just like that other Oriel man, William Allen. The novelist Evelyn Waugh, who was also a Catholic convert (embracing ‘the Scarlet Woman’ in the parlance of the day), would be taught by Oxford’s first Catholic don since the Reformation—this in the early 1920s.17

  If changes to the law releasing Catholics from their pariah status were slow in coming, then the popular attitude towards Catholicism seems still not quite to have caught up. On an evening in March 1998 the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, was seen alone in Westminster Cathedral, England’s foremost centre of Catholic worship. The press seized upon the story with extraordinary vigour. Was Blair thinking of converting? Could Britain have a Catholic Prime Minister? ‘Could a modern, democratic leader really declare that he orders his spiritual life within such a dogmatic framework [as the Catholic Church]?’ This last question was asked by the Anglican Bishop of Rochester, sparking a wider discussion about the conservative, autocratic nature of the Roman Church versus inherent British liberalism. It was as though the voices of long dead Tudor, Stuart and Hanoverian MPs, churchmen, and pamphleteers had suddenly crackled into life again and centuries on were venting their old bias. Their convictions then had been that the Catholic Church was a ‘foreign arbitrary power’, asking for ‘implicit faith and blind obedience’ (both of which were incompatible with ‘Civil Society’), and that Britain, with its ‘mildest laws in the universe’, was ‘the main bulwark against [such] arbitrary encroachments’. Their modern counterparts appeared to share many of these same sentiments.18

  In a recent Times article about whether a Catholic Secretary of State could head a department responsible for stem-cell research, the author made little attempt to address the subject of conflict of interest, preferring to highlight the ‘zealotry and fervour’ of the spiritual organization Opus Dei, with which the politician in question is supposed to have a connection. At the foot of the piece, in bold typeface, was the phrase ‘so zealous a militant Catholic’. It is unclear whether these comments about Catholics and Catholicism constitute part of a new debate, informed by Britain’s increased secularism, or whether they belong to an older one, informed by a pattern of centuries-old fear and prejudice. What does come across, though, is that the language of the debate seems suffused with a hostility disproportionate to the subject being debated. At the time of writing the Downing Street Press Office is still denying rumours that Blair is on the verge of converting. A pre-election pledge made by the Prime Minister in June 2001, to review the 1701 Act of Settlement by which Catholics are debarred from acceding to the British throne, appears to have stalled, amid concerns about how this might affect the relationship between the Church of England and the State.* Meanwhile, the media continues to preserve the myth that England’s Catholic missionaries were trained assassins—witness director Shekhar Kapur’s 1998 film Elizabeth and the BBC’s documentary on Elizabeth for its 2002 100 Great Britons series, both of which made reference to killer-priests.19

  Unsurprisingly, the country’s Catholics remain locked in their ‘otherness’, in that sliding scale of self-definition required of them when England and Rome first split. When the Earl of Denbigh converted to Catholicism in the nineteenth century, he had his coat of arms altered to declare: ‘First a Catholic, then an Englishman’. The MP Ann Widdecombe (who converted to Catholicism in 1993) described herself, in conversation with the author Dennis Sewell, as ‘a Catholic, British, Conservative, woman from Kent…in that order’. Evelyn Waugh summed the position up in his novel Brideshead Revisited, in which the Catholic Sebastian Flyte confirms that Catholics are simply not ‘like other people’. The Elizabethan propagandists’ victory, in turning England’s Catholics into a sub-species in their own country, is not diminished by the fact that it is Catholics who now label themselves as ‘different’, rather than the State.20

  They had come home as missionaries, most fresh out of seminary college: young men yearning to save their country from the ‘heresy’ into which it was plunged, Rome’s army of arguers, burning with the force of their rhetoric and the certainty of their beliefs
. Some were idealists; some unsure what else to do with themselves in a country bent on denying them advantage. Some were hopeful; some disaffected. Some longed to die; some sought only the stability of tradition. Some were regarded as the most able men of their generation; some were plodders, whose quiet labours went entirely unrecorded.

  Their Government had termed them spies and assassins, secret agents of the enemy, complete with the trappings of their dubious profession, false papers, aliases, disguises, and ciphers; and as such it had hunted them down. ‘Shall no subject that is a spy…against his natural prince be taken and punished as a traitor, because he is not found with…a weapon, but yet is taken in his disguised apparel with…other manifest tokens to prove him a spy for traitors?’ This Sir William Cecil had asked back in 1583—and it was a good question. How could you tell apart the man who behaved like a secret agent and was a secret agent, from the man who behaved like a secret agent, but was a man of God (even if you, yourself, had forced that mode of behaviour upon him by your laws)?21

  No doubt some of the missionaries grew to share the same sense of seething resentment felt by many of the Catholic laity with whom they consorted; no doubt some were privy to information, plans, and plottings, to which they had no right. But, as Oswald Tesimond asked, ‘How many things do priests know of which they do not approve?’ And Henry Garnet would write to Anne Vaux: ‘who can hinder but he must know things sometimes which he would not.’22