God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests & the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot (17 page)

If families like the Yelvertons, Bedingfelds and Southwells were finding it hard to accept the new religion, then they had now become the focus not only of the Government’s attention, but also of the Jesuits’. When Henry Garnet and Robert Southwell sailed for England in 1586, among their instructions from Rome was an order to deal only with the gentry.
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It would be wrong to view this as snobbery on the part of the mission. Rather it offered a realistic appraisal of Elizabethan society. As Gerard wrote, ‘in the districts I was living in now Catholics were very few. They were mostly from the better classes; none or hardly any, from the ordinary people, for they are unable to live in peace, surrounded as they are by most fierce Protestants’. Tudor England might have seen the unstoppable rise of the middle classes, but there was no concomitant improvement in the situation of, or attitudes to, the working classes. Bluntly, the ordinary people were considered of little importance in the subtle game being fought for religious supremacy. Shortly before leaving for England Edmund Campion would summarize the position thus (in terms immediately recognizable to his contemporaries, if distasteful today): ‘Of their martyrs they brag no more now. For it is now come to pass that for a few apostates and cobblers of theirs burned, we have Bishops, Lords, Knights, the old nobility.’
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But it was the practical advantage gained by concentrating on the gentry that was of most concern to the Jesuits. The great country houses of Tudor England were still kingdoms within a kingdom, despite the decline of feudalism. As late as the 1580s the Earl of Derby’s household comprised some one hundred and forty members, excluding his family. According to thirteenth century ecclesiastical law a landowner was responsible for the spiritual probity of his vassals. In Elizabethan England this law might no longer apply, but the sentiment it encapsulated remained intact and it was a sentiment the Jesuits were quick to exploit. Convert the master and the servant would follow; reconcile a landowner to the Catholic Church and provide him with a seminary priest to minister to his household and the entire mini-kingdom could be won back to the faith. John Gerard summarized the policy thus: ‘The way, I think, to go about making converts…is to bring the gentry over first, and then their servants, for Catholic gentle folk must have Catholic servants.’ Practical, too, from the point of view of safety, was the fact that in the coming and going of a large house, one more face among so many could pass unnoticed. A new tutor, a steward who spent little time working as a steward, a visiting sportsman like John Gerard would not attract unwelcome attention. But there was another and even more specific safety aspect that, in the end, would make the country houses of England valuable to the Jesuit mission, that would turn them into the nation’s new Catholic churches. They had legions of rooms. They had capacious attics. They had many staircases and miles of corridors, they had underground sewers and solid, thick brickwork. In short, they had space. More importantly, they had sufficient space not just for the constructions of legitimate architecture, but for the concealments of an entirely different kind of building work. Upon their walls might hang the finest art;
behind
their walls lay craftsmanship no less masterly. ‘When God will protect,’ wrote John Gerard, ‘He can hide a Felix between two walls, and make spiders His workmen to cover the entry with their webs.’ Except neither God nor the Jesuits needed spiders as workmen: they had Nicholas Owen.
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The village of Oxborough lies about fifteen miles from Grimston. On a day probably in 1589, some time during the six to eight months he remained with the Yelvertons, John Gerard took the road south, riding through countryside studded with villages, small stone parish churches, dense coppices and damp marshland. It was a journey he must have made several times before, accompanied by his guide Edward Yelverton, but this time Gerard had specific work in hand and new company beside him. Nearing Oxborough, the spire of St John the Evangelist loomed out of the trees on the left. Ahead lay walls, outbuildings, a glimpse of formal gardens and the tall twin redbrick turrets of the medieval gatehouse of Oxburgh Hall, home to the Bedingfeld family.

Oxburgh had once belonged to those same rapacious Norfolk nobles who had roamed the county terrifying their neighbours, before passing into the hands of the more respectable Bedingfelds early in the fifteenth century. Edmund Bedingfeld had built the present house in the 1480s complete with moat and battlements, but his fortifications were more for decoration than defence, sign of the changing times.

Cross over Oxburgh’s bridge today and pass through the wide brick archway and you come out into a large quadrangle, doorways opening off it. A porter’s lodge at the foot of the gatehouse’s western turret leads you to a circular brick staircase, climbing all the way up to the crenellated rooftop. From these stairs you can access the King’s Room, on the first floor over the archway, named after Elizabeth’s grandfather Henry VII, who stayed at Oxburgh in 1487. A pale northerly light streams in through its vast central window, picking out the huge fireplace opposite, and the fine silken bed hangings. In the far corner beyond the window stands a door that opens onto a small octagonal chamber set in the eastern turret. This, in turn, leads into a garderobe (lavatory) with its draughty opening down to the moat below.

On that day in
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.1589, with the then owner Thomas Bedingfeld’s blessing, this garderobe became the centre of concerted if highly clandestine activity. Nicholas Owen, Oxford joiner and hide-builder of genius, the Jesuits’ secret weapon in their holy war against the English Church, had just been put to work.

While John Gerard had been travelling Europe, tasting prison and training as a Jesuit priest, Nicholas Owen had remained in Oxford. In 1577 his father had enrolled him on an eight-year apprenticeship, under the eye of Oxford joiner William Conway. Here he had learned carving and turning, the creating of seamless joints, the constructing of wide-beamed wooden staircases that curled around landings, untwisting from floor to ceiling, of sinuous, linenfold panelling that enveloped a room, of coffers, chests, bedsteads and joint-stools. In 1587 the commentator W. Harrison observed, ‘The furniture of our houses…is grown in manner even to passing delicacy and herein I do not speak of the nobility and gentry only, but likewise of the lowest sort in most places of our south country.’ Nicholas Owen was trained in the deceptive art of conjuring delicacy out of dense English oak.
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Nothing is known of Owen in the four years between his completing this apprenticeship and starting work at Oxburgh Hall, though according to Gerard, he, too, was a newcomer to the mission. But if the details of Owen’s childhood and early adulthood remain an enticing blank, we do know that in 1588 or 1589 an unknown Oxford joiner in his mid to late twenties presented himself to Jesuit Superior Henry Garnet, asking to be his servant. And however this meeting came about, Garnet leapt at the offer.
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In 1585, the year before Garnet’s arrival in England, a clause had been introduced into English law that had horrified Catholics. The clause was part of the new Treason Act against Jesuit priests; it stated that any layman who ‘shall wittingly and willingly receive, relieve, comfort, aid, or maintain any such Jesuit, [or] seminary priest…shall…for such offence be adjudged a felon’. It was small comfort that the House of Lords rejected an earlier draft of the bill, attempting to make the crime an act of treason rather than felony: the penalty in either case was death. English Catholics now found themselves in potentially the same position as England’s first martyr St Alban, killed
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304 for offering refuge to a Christian priest.
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In April that year, soon after the clause became law, an emergency meeting was called at Hoxton to the west of the city of London, home of Mr Wylford. Attending the meeting were leading members of the Catholic laity, including Sir Thomas Tresham, Sir William Catesby and Lord Vaux, along with representatives of the seminary priests. Also present was Garnet’s immediate predecessor as Jesuit Superior, Father William Weston.
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The talk was angry and urgent. In view of this change in legislation, against which all of them had protested, was it fair to expect Catholic householders to give aid to the missionaries arriving from the Continent? No matter how desperate the priests’ need for shelter, should families risk their lives and their lands by taking them in? No doubt many views were aired, but finally it was agreed ‘that the priests shall shift for themselves abroad, as in inns or such like places, and not visit any Papists…except they be sent for’. The young priests were not to be left entirely unprovided for, though: ‘it was ordered the Lord Vaux should pay to the relief of priests that would tarry, one hundred marks’. Tresham, Catesby and Wylford would pay ‘one hundred marks the piece’. Certain ‘other gentlemen’ were assessed ‘at lower sums’. All this money was to be placed into a central fund and administered by Vaux’s son Henry, a former cohort of George Gilbert, on behalf of the priests. The meeting broke up soon afterwards and the members departed to break the unhappy news to the rest of the missionaries. All except one man. He sat down to write to Sir Francis Walsingham. Within hours the Council was in possession of a detailed account of all that had taken place at Hoxton. Government agent Nicholas Berden—who earlier had written ‘I profess myself a spy, but I am not one for gain but to serve my country’—had earned his retainer that day.
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The solution reached at Hoxton was only intended as a stopgap measure while the Catholic laity petitioned Elizabeth to repeal the offending clause. Should that fail, wrote Berden, they were determined ‘to adventure the danger of the statute’. The following year William Weston, along with the newly arrived Henry Garnet and Robert Southwell, reconvened at Hurleyford on the banks of the River Thames near Marlow, to decide how best to break the new law safely. Hurleyford belonged to the Catholic Richard Bold. It was a secluded house with the added advantage of standing on the Berkshire/Buckinghamshire border. Should it be raided in the general search of Catholic properties ordered that month, Weston would try to escape by crossing the county line; pursuivants had no authority outside their own shire.
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Present at the meeting were familiar faces from Hoxton and each day, after a sung mass conducted by ‘Mr Byrd, the very famous English musician and organist’, they sat down to discuss business.
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The only absentee from before was Nicholas Berden, so sadly the precise details of this business have not been recorded; Weston only notes ‘I told them what I knew about conditions in England’. The figures would have made poor listening. Since 1574 some three hundred priests, seminary and Jesuit, had returned home, but of them, only about one hundred and thirty were still at work; thirty-three had been executed, fifty were in prison, several had died from natural causes and over sixty had been banished or fled voluntarily. Since it took between two and seven years to train a priest and the seminaries operated on a tight budget, this was not a good return on investment; a new policy was in order. Weston noted, ‘Then we discussed our future methods of work and the prospects that lay before us.’ It seemed these future methods were to depend heavily on men like Nicholas Owen.
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Cuthbert Mayne had been arrested in his bedroom at Golden House. Edmund Campion had been discovered with two others in a rudimentary shelter visible from the outside; during the same raid his host’s brother had been forced to hide in the dovecote. Robert Persons once took refuge in a haystack.
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It was clear that though basic hiding places existed in some Catholic houses—to conceal forbidden priests and forbidden books—there had as yet been no real attention paid to hide-building as a necessary and improvable craft. Weston, himself, could attest to this. Once he had hidden in a barn; on another occasion he had fled underground, to a purpose-built hide. ‘Catholic houses have several places like this,’ he wrote, ‘otherwise there would be no security.’ This one, though, ‘was constructed with no particular cunning or ingenuity’. It ‘was dark, dank and cold, and so narrow that I was forced to stand the entire time’. Weston was lucky. Had his hide been tucked into the side of a chimney-stack, or positioned in the hole under a garderobe turret, as so many of these early ones were, he would soon have been found (as they, themselves, have been). Such hides were built to a formula and discovered formulaically. With the Hurleyford conference this was to change. If Catholic families were safely to be provided with a priest, then they must also be provided with a safe priest-hole. Five days after the meeting broke up Weston was arrested on the streets of London near Bishopsgate and Henry Garnet was left in charge of implementing this policy. No wonder he was happy to welcome Nicholas Owen to the Jesuit mission.

As John Gerard opened up the county of Norfolk for the Jesuits, carrying out the work for which Campion had been destined at the time of his arrest, Nicholas Owen rode with him. They made a contrasting pair: the aristocratic Gerard, to whom Garnet had given the nickname Long John of the Little Beard, and the diminutive Owen, who soon became known as Little John. With Edward Yelverton vouching for Gerard to neighbours sympathetic to the faith and with Gerard vouching for Owen as the Jesuits’ hide-builder, a chain was quickly formed leading from Norfolk, via London (which served as a general sorting office), all the way to the colleges on the Continent. Henry Garnet would later describe this chain, and the others like it, criss-crossing the country, to Jesuit General Claudio Aquaviva: ‘When the priests first arrive from the seminaries, we give them every help we can. The greater part of them, as opportunity offers, we place in fixed residences. This is done in a very large number of families through our offices.’
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