God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests & the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot (35 page)

The question put to him there, the so-called Bloody Question, went as follows. ‘What would you do if the Pope were to send over an army and declare that his only object was to bring the kingdom back to its Catholic allegiance? And if he stated at the same time that there was no other way of re-establishing the Catholic faith; and commanded everyone by his apostolic authority to support him? Whose side would you be on then—the Pope’s or the Queen’s?’
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Whose side would you be on then—the Pope’s or the Queen’s? This question summed up the English Government’s hostility towards the mission. Moreover, it illustrated the fundamental dishonesty at the heart of the English Catholic position, a dishonesty that the missionaries themselves had done everything in their power—indeed had been trained—to ignore. Because, as things stood in this conflict, there were only two sides, Pope’s and Queen’s; and England’s Catholics were attempting—for dear life no less than for their dearer faith—to pretend there were not. If you were Catholic then Elizabeth was illegitimate; if Elizabeth were illegitimate she had no right to occupy the throne, she was a usurper; moreover, the Pope had confirmed her illegitimacy and had sought to depose her from that throne. Conclusion: if you were Catholic then you must support that deposition. You must support the Pope. Except for two factors, which every English Catholic, missionary and lay person with half a mind on survival now clung to with a fervour born of desperation.

First, the full extent of the Pope’s powers had always been a matter of dispute. It was an eleventh century document, the
Dictatus Papae
, attributed to Pope Gregory VII, that laid claim, on the Pope’s behalf, to supreme legislative power over all Christendom, including the right to depose monarchs. It made sense for this document to have sprung from Gregory’s pontificate: at the time he was engaged in a long-running and bitter campaign to stop the papacy becoming a sinecure in the gift of the Holy Roman Emperor. But when, three centuries later, Pope Clement V decamped from Rome to Avignon as a personal favour to an ambitious King of France, it gave the lie to the belief that the Pope was the impartial Father of all Europe.
*
The history of Christendom was littered with examples of wilful monarchs dictating policy and compliant popes obeying. Indeed, in the hands of a powerful king, a pliable pope could be the deciding factor in international disputes and personal rivalries, brought in to add a biblical seal of approval to a wholly political conflict. In 1521, before thoughts of schism had come to haunt him, Henry VIII had won the title Defender of the Faith from a grateful Pope Leo X, for his attack on Protestant heresy. But arguably, Henry could have secured his divorce and avoided schism altogether had Leo’s successor, Clement VII, not lived in fear of the then Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. Charles, Catherine of Aragon’s nephew, had an unfortunate tendency to sack Rome if the Pope displeased him. Under these circumstances it was highly unlikely Clement would ever sanction the divorce, disgrace and ruin of Charles’ aunt.

To add further uncertainty to the issue of papal power, the history of Christendom was similarly littered with examples of popes claiming authority over monarchs and monarchs choosing to turn a deaf ear. Even Mary Tudor—‘a person not a little devoted to the Roman religion’ in Sir William Cecil’s masterly understatement—was known to have disobeyed the Pope when he attempted to dismiss her favourite, Cardinal Pole. So though advocates of papal supremacy might scour the Bible for texts with which to support their claims—Dr William Allen was a practised exponent of the art—there was just enough doubt surrounding the subject to admit the flicker of hope offered by the all-important second factor. And this came stamped with the authority of Christ, himself.
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‘Render unto Caesar the things which be Caesar’s, and unto God the things which be God’s’: Christ’s response to a situation of potential dual loyalty similar to that faced by English Catholics now. Crucially this response suggested that there
was
a distinction between spiritual and secular jurisdiction and that Caesar had as much claim on a subject’s obedience as God, so long as each kept to his own sphere of influence. The problem was, with the Pope claiming powers of deposition and with English religion a matter of Parliamentary legislation, those two spheres did not just overlap, they were almost indistinguishable; in Elizabeth’s England there was nothing so helpful as Caesar’s image on the back of a coin to indicate where loyalty lay at any given moment. The Bloody Question was the government’s attempt to impose from the outside, by means of a single interrogatory, a forced separation of the secular from the spiritual. Unfortunately for English Catholics the Bloody Question was unanswerable.

Edmund Campion had been asked a version of the question back in 1581—did he ‘acknowledge her majesty to be a true and lawful queen, or a pretended queen, and deprived [of her throne]?’—and had had the good sense to fudge the answer: ‘this question depends upon the fact of Pius [V], whereof [I am] not judge’. Alexander Briant, executed alongside Campion, chose the path of theological uncertainty and told his interrogators that ‘whether the pope have authority to withdraw [subjects] from obedience to her majesty, [I] know not’. By May the following year the question had crystallized into its more recognizable form and been put to those priests arraigned with Campion, but still not yet executed. Thomas Ford and William Filby both deferred making an answer ‘until that case should happen’. Robert Johnson gamely attempted to plead the secular/spiritual divide, saying, ‘if such…invasion, should be made for temporal matters, [I] would take part with her majesty; but, if it were for any matter of [my] faith…[I] were then bound to take part with the Pope’. All three were swiftly dispatched to Tyburn.
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Campion, Briant et al. had been justified, perhaps, in treating the question as entirely hypothetical. After all, at the beginning of the 1580s England was not yet at war. Furthermore, if centuries’ worth of theologians had failed to reach any agreement on the matter, who were they to venture an answer now? But as the Spanish Armada set sail, weighed down by the Pope’s blessing and Philip II’s dynastic ambitions, for both England’s Government and England’s Catholics the Bloody Question acquired sharp new teeth. The concern for the Government was whether it could trust English Catholics not to support the invasion; for English Catholics it was whether, should those invasion forces land and order them to fight, they would be fighting—and dying—for God or a foreigner. The one was acceptable, the other markedly less so for most Englishmen.

In the event, England’s Catholics were never forced to make their choice, but some time in the spring or summer of that year the Privy Council approached the Crown’s lawyers with what seems to have been a highly controversial request. The request built upon a suggestion to Elizabeth made by Sir William Cecil in 1583, in a paper entitled
Advice to Queen Elizabeth, in Matters of Religion and State.
This suggestion, part of a general summary of the Catholic position at the time, was characteristically pragmatic. Instead of asking Catholics to take the Oath of Supremacy (which might be accounted a religious oath), wrote Cecil, they should be asked the Bloody Question. Those who swore that they would not take up arms against the Pope could then immediately, and confidently, be accounted traitors—and no one could accuse the Government of religious persecution. Interestingly, Cecil, himself, was convinced that most Catholics, however devout, would chose country over conscience at this point. The question remained, though, what to do with those Catholics, like Campion, Filby or Ford, who refused to answer, or who fudged the issue. Could their silence, or fudging, be taken as an indication of their guilt? This appears to have been the proposition put to the Crown’s lawyers. And while the Crown’s lawyers met to consider the case, Henry Garnet and Robert Southwell seem to have called an emergency meeting of their own to decide how best to respond to this latest threat to their co-religionists.
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Whether or not the Jesuits consulted a team of Catholic lawyers is unclear, but their agreed new position, as Southwell explained it in his letter to Claudio Aquaviva that summer, was eminently legalistic. Since ‘it was not a question of faith’, explained South-well, ‘…it was thought more prudent to use language that was truthful and yet would not irritate the magistrates’. Priests should therefore swear ‘that as priests it was unlawful for them to bear arms’. Furthermore, they should declare that they were praying to God for Him ‘to favour the side on which His cause and that of justice stood’: so God could choose who to fight for, Elizabeth or the Pope. Laymen were advised to ask for the chance ‘to prove their loyalty to sovereign and country by defending both against…unjust aggression’, neatly concealing, behind a flurry of promised activity, the fact that some might actually view a papal invasion as just aggression.
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It was the best counsel the Jesuits could give under the circumstances, but it was the Crown’s lawyers who saved the day for the mission. When their answer came back on 20 July it marked a conclusive victory for the forces of justice over the forces of fear. No, the Government could not take silence as a statement of guilt. Nor were those Catholics guilty who declared themselves ‘unlearned and ignorant and so not able to answer’, nor those who pointed out the illegality of being questioned on what they
might
do at some time in an unspecified future. Certainly those who answered in this fashion were ‘dangerous persons’, but ‘unless some other action drawing them in danger of the law may be proved against them’, they were not traitors and could not be proceeded against as such. With this polite but firm admonishment to the Government for attempting to enshrine thought-crime in the statute books—and removing the right to silence into the bargain—the Crown’s lawyers rendered Cecil’s Bloody Question legally toothless. Morally, though, it still retained its bite.
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John Gerard had now to come up with an answer that would protect him from accusations of disloyalty to the State, while not compromising his loyalty to the Pope as head of the Church. Nor must he provide the kind of definitive judgement on the matter that might be used against other Catholics in the future. All this, while retaining his attitude of studied insolence in the face of Richard Topcliffe’s bullying. Gerard, himself, was clear about the difficulties: Topcliffe ‘had so framed his question’, he wrote, ‘that whatever I answered I would be sure to suffer for it, either in body or in soul’. His answer was a considered one: ‘I am a loyal Catholic and I am a loyal subject of the Queen. If this were to happen, and I do not think it likely, I would behave as a loyal Catholic and as a loyal subject.’ It was a brilliant attempt to square the unsquarable, to assert that English Catholics were bound by a dual loyalty to Rome and Elizabeth, and to redefine that loyalty in terms of individual conscience rather than blind, objective allegiance, but it utterly failed to address the issue at stake. For Rome had ruled that loyal English Catholics could not be loyal Elizabethan subjects, not while Elizabeth remained under sentence of deposition. It was hardly surprising that Topcliffe should regard this as casuistry at work, slippery and not to be trusted. Gerard was returned to his cell while his accusers returned to pondering his immediate fate.
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On 13 April 1597 the Privy Council drafted the following letter.

You shall understand that one Gerard, a Jesuit, by her Majesty’s commandment is of late committed to the Tower of London for that it hath been discovered to her Majesty he very lately did receive a packet of letters out of the Low Countries which are supposed to come out of Spain, being noted to be a great intelligencer and to hold correspondence with Persons the Jesuit and other traitors, beyond the seas. These shall be therefore to require you to examine him strictly upon such interrogatories as shall be fit to be ministered unto him and he ought to answer to manifest the truth in that behalf and other things that may concern her Majesty and the State, wherein if you shall find him obstinate, undutiful or unwilling to declare and reveal the truth as he ought to do by his duty and allegiance, you shall by virtue hereof cause him to be put to the manacles and such other torture as is used in that place, that he may be forced to utter directly and truly his uttermost knowledge in all these things that may any way concern her Majesty and the State and are meet to be known.

After almost three years of an extraordinarily liberal captivity the situation for John Gerard had just taken a sharp turn for the worse.

The chief question raised by this letter is, if Gerard were such a ‘great intelligencer’—i.e. an intriguer—why was he permitted to remain in the Clink for so long, under so little supervision and without any form of action being attempted against him? To put his captivity into perspective, he was arrested on 23 April 1594 and transferred to the Tower of London on 12 April 1597, during which time he was subjected to an unspecified number of examinations, none of which appears officially to have been recorded. Over the same period a total of thirteen other Catholics were executed, of whom nine were priests; of those nine, the two with most bearing on Gerard’s condition were Robert Southwell and Henry Walpole, both executed in 1595, on 21 February and 7 April respectively.

Southwell, too, had experienced an unaccountable delay (between arrest and trial), but he had spent his incarceration in the Tower, in strict solitary confinement, whereas Gerard was lodged in an openly Catholic prison known for its comparative laxity. Walpole, on the other hand, had been fast-tracked from York, to the Tower and then back again to York for execution, a victim of circumstances beyond his control. His case makes for a strange and tortuously convoluted hunt through the State Papers, but it is worth outlining the salient facts in order to indicate how the Government’s mind was working against the Jesuits in 1594.