God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests & the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot (25 page)

While Arundel remained alive, though, his wife Anne could draw on the powerful Howard name for influence and from the plentiful Howard coffers—which even the fines exacted from the family for Arundel’s Catholicism could not empty—for finance. Both were now at the Jesuits’ disposal. From his new base at Arundel House on the River Thames, tucked precariously between the Earl of Leicester’s London residence on one side and Somerset House, belonging to the Queen, on the other, Robert Southwell set about rebuilding the fortunes of the Jesuit press.
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His first publication was entitled
An Epistle of Comfort to the Reverend Priests, and to the Honourable, Worshipful, and other of the Lay sort, restrained in durance for the Catholic Faith.
Unlike the writings of Persons and Campion before him, this was largely a devotional work, containing arguments drawn from philosophy and theology and aimed at all those Catholics currently languishing in prison. Adversity was the ‘livery and cognizance of Christ’, he wrote, a ‘royal garment’ to be worn with pride by any disciple who aspired to be like his master. Mortal life was ever thus: ‘Our infancy is but a dream, our youth but a madness, our manhood a combat, our age but a sickness, our life misery, our death horror’; it was the rewards of the world hereafter that would bring heart’s ease. Put simply, Catholic suffering was not in vain. It was inspirational writing, hopeful, eloquent, charismatic, a powerful indicator of the uses to which the Jesuit thought to put his new press.
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At about the same time as Southwell was composing his
Epistle
he was also working on a poem,
Decease, Release
, commemorating the death of Mary, Queen of Scots, who, at Fotheringhay Castle on the morning of 7 February 1587, to a background noise of Parliamentary rejoicing and Elizabeth’s anguish, placed her head on an executioner’s block and so passed into legend. The last verse revealed a sentiment similar to that contained in the
Epistle
, but one drawn from a more personal agony:

Rue not my death, rejoice at my repose;
It was no death to me but to my woe;
The bud was opened to let out the rose,
The chain was loosed to let the captive go.
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To let the captive go: thoughts of death and of the escape that death brought with it had always haunted Southwell. While still in Rome he had written, ‘Ah, dearest Jesus, help and rescue me…Canst thou not kill for pity one who longs to die?’ A later poem contained the lines:

In plaints I pass the length of lingering days;
Free would my soul from mortal body fly
And tread the track of death’s desired ways.

On the eve of his departure to England he had headed his final letter ‘from death’s ante-room’. It was a fearful, almost hysterical letter. ‘I know very well’, he wrote, ‘that sea and land are gaping wide for me; and lions, as well as wolves, go prowling in search of whom they may devour.’ If it ever struck him as a bitter irony that these should be the words of a man returning willingly to the country he loved, he did not say.
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Even more so than Edmund Campion before him, Robert Southwell could have thrived in Elizabeth’s England. Campion’s had been a native wit and an ability to inspire, and the Queen and her circle had been more than ready to extend the ladder of social preferment to him. Southwell, no less keenly intelligent, was an insider from the start. Indeed, his was a fertile inheritance: the earth, blood and bone of old England—land, rank and wealth—coupled with the canny knack of navigating the new: Robert’s grandfather Sir Richard Southwell had prospered through four different reigns, no mean achievement, and on his death in 1564 had left his family among the richest in England. Only enmity with the Howards, Robert’s future benefactors, threatened the Southwells’ continued success: Sir Richard was one of those to accuse Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey—Arundel’s uncle—of treason in 1546. But if the Southwells were traditional gentry, with the added bite of a well-honed survival instinct, then Robert’s mother’s family, the Copleys, was peopled with coming men. It was through the Copleys that Robert Southwell was related to the Cecils and the Bacons, both families now well on the way to becoming dynastic power brokers. Through the Copleys, too, Southwell could expect personal recognition from the Queen. Bridget and Thomas Copley, Robert’s mother and uncle, had stood by Elizabeth throughout her traumatic teenage years. Thomas had even gone so far as to convert to Protestantism in a show of loyalty to the princess. Now Elizabeth was godmother to Thomas’ eldest son, no matter that Thomas had rejoined the Catholic Church and chosen voluntary exile over remaining in England. But perhaps of even more importance to the young Robert, through the Copleys the novice poet was related by marriage to the Wriothesleys. Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton, was William Shakespeare’s patron.
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Under different circumstances Robert Southwell could and, likely, would have joined the swelling ranks of gentlemanwriters peopling late sixteenth century England, another Sidney, another Ralegh, well heeled, well versed in the popular new style of chivalrous courtly love. It might still have been a cut-throat existence: both Sidney’s and Ralegh’s lives bore testament to the fact that even the best wits could flounder in a shifting world of capricious royal favouritism and jealous rivalry. It would not, though, have been a traitor’s existence, stealing into England in disguise, with a price upon his head and the anticipation of an early execution.

So much of Southwell’s life reads like an act of expiation. In 1588, as he described to Aquaviva the horrors taking place in England post-Armada, he confessed uncertainty as to ‘whether it was better to confine to home my lament over our domestic calamity, or to impart to other nations the inward sorrow we here alone endure’. He feared ‘lest the recital of [the Government’s] impious conduct should bring more hatred on the English name’. For Southwell, the betrayal of English Catholicism had been a betrayal of everything English. It was a betrayal, avowed patriot that he was, that he felt deeply ashamed of broadcasting to the world and it was as though he now dedicated his life to atoning for it. Perhaps here were the roots of his bitter bouts of self-doubt, his self-disgust, his constant, almost clinical preoccupation with death: to take on the sins of England was a load far greater than he knew himself to be capable of bearing.
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But, if Southwell had wanted to take upon himself the sins of England, then he was already, from his earliest youth and on a familial level, familiar with the art. From the Southwells’ manor house of Horsham St Faith near Norwich the family looked out over the fruits of old Sir Richard Southwell’s religious pragmatism: the remnants of the Benedictine priory of St Faith, acquired during the dissolution. Nearby, a new house was rising from its rubble, promising an even statelier future. Yet for all those raised within sight of the many ruins such as these that scarred the English countryside, between their broken stones could also be seen the stumbling shapes of those monks, now reduced to vagabondage, who once had inhabited their walls. And about these spectral figures clung ghostly rumours, whispered among the country children and the superstitious, of a Monks’ Curse:

Of long ago hath been the common voice:
In evil-gotten goods, the third shall not rejoice.

Robert Southwell, the third generation benefactor of the monks’ eviction, the youngest son of a family of eight children, the acutely sensitive would-be poet, seems to have become the self-appointed sacrificial victim of his family’s worldly success. And if for Southwell the mission meant martyrdom, then it was an end he anticipated with an eager terror.
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It was always unlikely Southwell could slip into England unnoticed. Sure enough, his first letter to Claudio Aquaviva, reporting his safe landing in July 1586, revealed that ‘from the lips of the Queen’s Council, my name has become known to certain persons’. Almost immediately the hunt was at his heels. That November the chief magistrate for Middlesex, Justice Richard Young, acting on information he had received from priest-turned-informer Anthony Tyrrell, led a posse of men against the Vaux house in Hackney.
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The raid was set for the early hours when it was known Southwell would be at mass. The doorkeeper was overwhelmed and armed pursuivants dispersed about the house. Southwell had just time to conceal himself. Later he told Aquaviva, ‘I heard them threatening and breaking woodwork and sounding the walls to find hiding places; yet, by God’s goodness, after four hours’ search they found me not, though separated from them only by a thin partition rather than a wall.’ Young eventually withdrew, placing the house under surveillance and taking Lord Vaux’s son Henry with him. Henry, brother of Eleanor and Anne Vaux and head of George Gilbert’s relief operation since the latter’s flight abroad, was caught with two of Southwell’s letters addressed to Rome on him; he was led off to the Marshalsea prison. It was not until early December that Southwell was finally able to slip away from Hackney undetected to the country. There was to be no such escape for Henry Vaux. In prison he fell seriously ill. He was released in May 1587 and died that November, attended at the end by Henry Garnet.
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Vaux’s death threw into painfully sharp relief Southwell’s struggle. It was the Jesuit’s duty to remain alive, sacrificing, if necessary, his lay helpers in the process, with all the attendant feelings of guilt and self-disgust to which he had always been prey. But the greater his sense of self-disgust, the greater this duty chafed at him, nagging at the raw nerve of his own craving for release.

Throughout this period Southwell remained pivotal to the mission’s smooth running. He shared with Garnet the difficult task taken on by the Jesuits of coordinating the placement of newly arrived priests. He thrived at the even more difficult task of steadying the nerves of England’s Catholics as the threat of the Spanish Armada drew nearer, then passed, leaving the spreading stain of Catholic blood in its wake. John Gerard would later say of him he ‘excelled at this work. He was so wise and good, gentle and loveable’. Indeed, the two men quickly became close friends and Gerard offers a thumbnail sketch of Southwell struggling to learn the rudiments of falconry to serve him as a disguise. ‘Frequently, as he was travelling about with me later,’ wrote Gerard, ‘he would ask me to tell him the correct [hunting] terms and worried because he could not remember and use them when need arose.’
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Throughout this period, too, Southwell continued composing poems. His style is lyrical, heavily influenced by Petrarch and by the English poets of earlier decades, Wyatt, Howard and Gascoigne. Still, it reveals a familiarity with the work of his contemporaries, in particular that of Sir Edward Dyer, the current Court favourite; twice, Southwell borrowed directly from Dyer, on one occasion adapting the latter’s
Phancy
, a lover’s lament, into his own
A Sinner’s Complaint.
Elsewhere, he exerted a powerful influence of his own. Poet and dramatist Ben Jonson would later attest that had he ‘written that piece of [Southwell’s]
The Burning Babe
, he would have been content to destroy many of his [own poems]’:

As I in hoary winters night stood shivering in the snow,
Surprised I was with sudden heat which made my heart to glow;
And lifting up a fearful eye to view what fire was near,
A pretty Babe all burning bright did in the air appear.
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The first line contained a chill echo of Southwell’s recent exploits, as he described them to Aquaviva in a letter of December 1588. ‘I have been’, he wrote, ‘on horseback round a great part of England in the bitterest time of the year, choosing bad roads and a foul sky for my pilgrimage, rather than waiting for the fair weather when all the Queen’s messengers are on the prowl, much worse than any rainstorm or hurricane.’ Then in 1591 came the Government’s broadside against the mission and Southwell turned again from poet to polemicist. Some time in November of that year he sat down to write
An Humble Supplication to Her Majesty in Answer to the Late Proclamation.
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‘Most mighty and most merciful, most feared and best beloved Princess’: Southwell framed his response around the assumption that Elizabeth, herself, had been kept ignorant of the iniquities being practised upon England’s Catholics and that the proclamation was the work of her Government, in particular of William Cecil. That he truly believed this to be the case is unlikely—by now it was common knowledge among the missionaries that priest-hunter Richard Topcliffe was Elizabeth’s man. Nonetheless, it was a literary conceit that served his purpose well, allowing him to make direct appeal to the Queen’s oft-stated clemency. Elizabeth, he wrote, was ‘the only sheet-anchor of our last hopes’. Then he proceeded, item by item, to refute the charges made in the proclamation. His arguments were logical, rational, a step away from the highly charged, often inflammatory outpourings that had characterized the war of words between Protestants and Catholics so far.
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Bluntly, he addressed the unpalatable truth of Anthony Babington’s treachery. Though he remained convinced the plot was as much a product of Francis Walsingham’s invention as of Babington’s own, he was quick to condemn the latter for his crime. And yet, he asked, was it right to judge all Catholics by Babington’s actions? It ‘were a hard course to reprove…all Protestants for one Wyatt’, he pointed out, a fact of which Elizabeth, who, in her youth, had narrowly escaped execution for alleged complicity in Wyatt’s rebellion against Queen Mary, was all too well aware. What reason, he asked, had English Catholics to kill the Queen when ‘the death of your Majesty would be an Alarm to infinite uproars and likelier to breed all men a general calamity, than Catholics any Cause of Comfort’? If the missionaries were rebels and assassins, then surely ‘we should [have been] trained in Martial exercises, busied in politique and Civil affairs, hardened to the field, and made to the weapon; whereas a thousand eyes and ears are daily witnesses that our studies are nothing else but Philosophy and Divinity’? Here was a coolly reasoned attempt to engage with the charges of traitor and fifth columnist that had become so much a part of the mission’s, and of English Catholic, daily life.
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