God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests & the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot (23 page)

For Henry Garnet the raid would prompt a crisis of confidence and within hours of the pursuivants’ departure he had written to Claudio Aquaviva offering his resignation. He would also admit, some while later, that he had known Baddesley Clinton was under surveillance. Just before the meeting the county pursuivant, a man called Hodgkins, had called at the house. Unhappy at his reception he threatened to return again within ten days, ‘bringing with him a party of men to break down the doors and demolish the very walls’. But word in the district was that Hodgkins was now occupied elsewhere; furthermore, Garnet had been sure ‘he could not come back into the immediate neighbourhood without our friends letting us know of it at once’. It had been a calculated risk to continue with the meeting, pitting danger against necessity, and this time it had paid off, but for Garnet the strain of leadership was telling. He had never been convinced of his suitability as head of the mission. Perhaps he also believed he had just come perilously close to carelessness. Now he requested permission ‘to hand over the torch to someone more expert than myself…and be allowed…to run, not by my own discretion, but under the guidance of others’. Aquaviva refused his assent.
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Garnet had sought for the mission men outstanding in their piety. In the wake of the raid on Baddesley Clinton—explaining his decision not to call the meeting off and evincing his own piety—he had written, ‘we…had exceeding confidence in God, for whose glory we were assembled’. Confidence such as this was the lifeblood of the mission and for those who had escaped the pursuivants at Baddesley Clinton their ordeal could only add to the certainty that God was on their side; John Gerard likened their experience to that of Daniel in the lion’s den. In spite of their hardships their cause must be just, for providence was showing them so. Piety left little room for doubt (despite the many examples of pious priests, Campion and the like, already caught and killed). Indeed, the history of the Christian Church told them piety was a weapon of unparalleled strength in battles of faith.
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The problem was their struggle with the English Government was not simply a battle of faith. Each priest executed for treason to the realm rather than for his religion proved it so, representing one more victory for an administration determined to keep tight control of the terms on which this conflict was fought. And as the survivors of Baddesley Clinton rode back to the districts in their charge, the Government was preparing yet another broadside to ensure that its battle with the mission would be played out on political terrain. Against politics, simple piety did not stand a chance.

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Topcliffe’s father and father-in-law had both come to the attention of the Government during the 1536 Pilgrimage of Grace, the ill-fated Catholic uprising in protest against Henry VIII’s religious reforms.

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Topcliffe’s connection with the Earl of Leicester came about through his wife’s family, the Willoughbys, who were allied to Leicester’s family. These useful contacts aside, Topcliffe’s marriage was not a happy one, clouded by allegations that he failed to pay his wife adequate maintenance; and the product of this marriage, Topcliffe’s son Charles, spent most of his adult life in trouble with the authorities. In 1602 Sir Robert Cecil wrote to Topcliffe, chiding him for not having had Charles ‘cleansed’.

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This was not an isolated incident. In late 1579/early 1580 Sir Francis Walsingham wrote unofficially to a number of county justices, instructing them not to ‘persecute’ recusants, ‘for that if you shall proceed therein, you shall not prevail to do that good you desire, but shall rather…fail through some commandment from hence, prohibiting you to surcease in proceeding in that behalf, which would breed no less discredit unto you than encouragement to the papists’. This perception that Elizabeth did not wish the laws to be enacted against Catholics at this period (probably because of her ongoing marriage negotiations with the French Duc d’Alençon) was supported by independent reports from the French and Spanish ambassadors.

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The Elizabethan spy network mainly consisted of an amorphous body of paid informants, reporting straight to the Government. There was no formal structure to it, but what little there was can be credited first to Cecil, then to Walsingham, who has been called the ‘father of the British Secret State’. It was not surprising that a paranoid age produced England’s first attempt at a secret service. Francis Bacon would note: ‘there is nothing makes a man suspect much, more than to know little’. The practice of paying informants for intelligence produced many dubious results, as a story told by the eighteenth century playwright Sheridan illustrates: an informant was paid a retainer of 1 guinea a week for general information and 2 guineas for serious information; of course all his information was serious. Little is known about these informants, but their letters reveal that the majority of them were impecunious debtors seeking relief from prison. On that fact alone the reliability of their intelligence can be judged.

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These six Jesuits were Garnet, Southwell, Oldcorne and Gerard, and two newcomers, Richard Holtby and John Curry, who arrived in England in the spring of 1589. Curry, a Cornishman, was stationed in the southwest of England, while Holtby, who earlier had served as Edmund Campion’s guide during his travels through the north of England, was sent to Yorkshire.

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There were six Walpole brothers in all: Henry, Richard (who became a Jesuit soon after Henry), Geoffrey, Thomas, Christopher and Michael. Geoffrey was the only one who never ventured abroad; indeed, he appears never to have moved far from home, not even to attend university. In 1608, aged forty-six, he married a cousin, Dorothy Beckham of Dersingham, and from then until his death in 1622 he remained at Dersingham. It was his younger brother Thomas who finally inherited Anmer Hall on their father’s death.

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An unlikely convert in the wake of Campion’s execution was the Jesuit’s former gaoler. According to Persons, ‘The man who had been Fr Campion’s private warden in the Tower of London is now a very fervent Catholic, though previously he was obstinate in his heresy.’

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John Owen was born in 1561, the earliest probable date of Nicholas Owen’s birth. His university career began at Corpus Christi College; then in 1579 he transferred to Trinity. On 1 December 1581 Walter Owen matriculated at Trinity as a college servant, the standard way for poorer students to fund their education.

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The correspondence between Persons and Aquaviva concerning the Jesuit Thomas Marshall gives some indication of the Society’s requirements. Initially Persons rejected Marshall’s request to join the mission because of a ‘sluggish nature of which he gave evidence’. Marshall pleaded to go. ‘I think’, wrote Persons to Aquaviva, ‘that this good father’s importunity will compel me to let him go to some district in England, in the hope that God will co-operate with his holy simplicity to a greater extent than, humanly speaking, can be expected.’ Aquaviva refused his assent. Later Persons wrote, ‘I am still of the same opinion that [Marshall] is not very suitable as regards talents though extremely suitable in the matter of spiritual zeal.’

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Bishop was imprisoned in the Marshalsea on 11 February 1582. The following year he was condemned to death on a generic charge of plotting against Elizabeth while in Reims and Rome. The sentence was eventually commuted to exile and he was banished in January 1585. In May 1591 he returned to England.

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Campion’s response to this accusation was remarkably controlled under the circumstances. He declared, ‘I am not indicted upon the Statute of Apparel.’

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In March 1598 returning Jesuit Oswald Tesimond was able to bully a fellow passenger—a Puritan—into stalling the enquiries of a galleon sent out to intercept their ship as it sailed up the Thames. The Puritan answered the galleon’s crew ‘so excellently and with such details, that they on board the galleon, instead of examining us, were examined by us’. Earlier, Tesimond had been forced to swim ashore when Dutch warships attacked the Spanish vessel carrying him to France. His capacity to improvise his way through an emergency would stand him in good stead during his years on the mission.

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Sadly, Brushford never had the chance ‘to forsake the world, and to serve God quietly in religion’ as he had hoped. En route from Reims to Spain in 1590, as a newly ordained Jesuit, he was captured off the Scilly Isles by an English warship and taken to Launceston prison in Cornwall. From there he was transferred to a London gaol, where he died early in 1593.

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A copy of this report exists in the handwriting of Henry More, Jesuit historian and great-grandson of Sir Thomas More. It is dated 1616. However, More did not join the mission until the 1620s and the original author is unknown.

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Garnet specified that missionaries ‘should also have good health and average intelligence’ and should not be perturbed ‘by the clamour and shouting of the enemy, since all the noise they make is to be accounted nothing more than the barking of dogs’.

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A letter to Garnet from the seminary priest John Pibush gives some indication of the esteem in which he was held by those he helped. ‘Dear Father, with all due affection I commend myself to you as to the first and best friend I have met since my return to my country…Well I remember your care for me, your advice that so greatly helped me, and I humbly thank you for your friendly conduct towards me.’ The letter also reveals Pibush’s thoughts about life on the mission: ‘those who purpose to come to this country and to work profitably therein, must bring along with them vigorous souls and mortified bodies. They must forgo all pleasures and renounce every game but that of football, which is made up of pushes and kicks, and requires constant effort, unless one would be trampled under foot; and in this game they have to risk their lives in order to save souls’. Pibush was arrested in Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire, in July 1593. He was executed at Southwark in February 1601.

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The sentence remained in place under Scottish law until 1950.

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It is unclear what happened to Owen next. In a letter of 1596 Henry Garnet mentioned that Nicholas Owen had a brother, a priest, then in prison. Afterwards, the name John Owen appears in a number of documents relating to the mission, indicating that—provided this was the same John Owen—he was still active in the Catholic cause. The last entry is dated 1618 when a John Owen was convicted of treason. At the intervention of the Spanish ambassador the sentence was commuted to one of banishment.

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In February 1594 the Catholic Benjamin Beard, a prisoner in the Fleet, wrote to Puckering offering his services in locating Younger. He took care, though, to ask for anonymity in his task—so as not to bring disgrace on his mother and his kindred, all of them being papists and recusants.

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A spy’s report of 1611 reveals how this system of safe routes home had grown over the years. ‘Three sundry courses they use in conveying seminaries to England; the one is by way of Rotterdam, by means of one, Mr Skult, a merchant and a great Papist, being employed by the King of Spain etc., who, by confession of Fr. Gardiner to me, hath conveyed into England above sixty priests, seminaries and Jesuits and he doth it by means of his shipping, for he attires them as mariners with thrum caps, and fishermen. The other is by way of St Valeris in France upon the River Somme, where divers Frenchmen are that continually go to Newcastle for coals. The other is by way of Hamburg.’

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This evidence comes from a secret meeting held in September 1590 at which Garnet was called upon to advise Catholics on the issue of the ownership of shipwrecked goods. According to common law anything washed ashore from a shipwreck belonged to the Crown. ‘Now a large number of Catholics with whom I have occasional dealings seize this property without scruple,’ Garnet informed Aquaviva. Despite many families’ evident belief that this wreckage was rightfully theirs in lieu of the recusancy fines they were paying, Garnet—a stickler for the law, despite his fugitive status—ruled in favour of the Crown.

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It is unclear how or when the Government first learned Garnet was the Jesuit Superior in England, but Henry Walpole, during his interrogation in York, noted, ‘The President [of the Council of the North] inquired of me who was the Superior of our Society in this Kingdom? Whether it was this, or the other, or who it was? Topcliffe answered, He knew who it was, and named him.’

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In a letter to Robert Persons of 9 April 1598, Garnet explained that every priest and layman captured was immediately ‘asked for Henry’.

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In addition to those named, and to Henry Garnet the Superior, there were three other Jesuits then at work in England: John Curry, Holtby’s travelling companion, and Thomas Stanney and John Nelson, seminary priests who, like Lister, had joined the Society while in England.

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The five Jesuits were Henry Garnet, Robert Southwell, John Gerard, Edward Oldcorne and Thomas Stanney. The names of the seminary priests are unknown.

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Gerard wrote indignantly, ‘Yes, that is the pitiful lot of Catholics—when men come with a warrant…it is they, the Catholics, not the authorities who send them, who have to pay. As if it were not enough to suffer, they are charged for suffering.’

Seven

‘In the beginning was the Word, and the
Word was with God, and the Word was God.’
St John’s Gospel
(King James Bible)

O
N
18 O
CTOBER
1591, the day of the Baddesley Clinton raid, Queen Elizabeth I put her signature to a new proclamation, the latest salvo in the English Government’s ongoing campaign against the mission. Its contents were a rich stew of fact, half-fact, paranoia and spin, liberally seasoned with a colourful invective.
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Its aim was to drive a wedge even further into the seam exposed three years before, during the Spanish Armada, dividing Englishmen more firmly than ever into two immutable and mutually exclusive camps: those loyal to Queen and country and those who were Catholic. And its timing—it was published a month later, in November—was guaranteed to earn it a sympathetic reading from anyone viewing the current hostilities between Europe’s twin leviathans, Spain and France, with sweaty-palmed apprehension.
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