God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests & the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot (43 page)

And now Persons retaliated, attacking Copley as ‘a little wanton idle-headed boy’ and describing the seminarian William Watson (who had also questioned Persons’ parentage) as ‘so wrong shapen and of so bad and blinking aspect that he looketh nine ways at once’. Persons’ book,
A Brief Apology, or defence of the Catholic ecclesiastical hierarchy
, was an attempt to lay out the case for the Jesuits (Garnet helped correct its factual errors), but its bellicose edge did little to calm the war of words. Neither did the fact that Blackwell appeared to have delayed publishing a papal brief, which condemned the polemicists and prohibited all further publications, until Persons had completed the book. As the historian William Camden recorded: ‘With sharp-pointed pens, venomous tongues, and slanderous books, did Jesuits and seculars fight one another.’
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Then, in the summer of 1601, Thomas Bluet, a Wisbech prisoner since 1580 and a leader of both the prison’s stirs and the Appellant movement, was given permission to come to London to collect alms for his fellow detainees. In London he was placed in the custody of the Bishop of London, Richard Bancroft. Bluet explained what happened next: Bancroft suddenly brought out ‘many letters and books of Persons…and other English Jesuits, inviting the King of Spain to invade England, as due of right to him, and urging private men to kill the Queen, by poison or sword’. Bluet was shocked and declared the seculars innocent of such treasons. Bancroft then explained that the sole reason for the Government’s severity towards Catholicism was that it believed all Catholics to be ‘guilty of these devices, and all [to be] disciples of the Jesuits’.
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The precise events of the next weeks are unclear, but it appears that by the end of June Bluet had met with the Council, then the Queen, and had devised a petition for Elizabeth, in which he protested secular loyalty and begged for limited freedom of conscience for England’s Catholics. Elizabeth’s reported response to this petition should have left Bluet in little doubt his request would come to nothing: ‘if I grant this liberty to Catholics, by this very fact I lay at their feet myself, my honour, my crown, and my life’. So it seems certain the Council did not pass her words onto him, for on 1 July 1601 Bluet wrote to John Mush with an extraordinary proposal. He had arranged with the Council, he told Mush, for a party of priests to leave England, under guise of banishment, and travel to Rome for an audience with the Pope. They were to offer the Pope, on behalf of the Government, an easing of the penal laws and the chance to negotiate religious toleration for English Catholics. In return, they were to demand from him a total ban on all Catholic treasons against England. ‘It hath cost me many a sweat and many bitter tears ‘ere I could effect it,’ Bluet told Mush. ‘I have in some sort pacified the wrath of our prince against us…and have laid the fault where it ought to be’: at the Jesuits’ doorstep. Where once the Government had used spies to sow dissent between the seminary priests and the Jesuits, now it was using seminary priests to defeat the Jesuits.
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In the autumn of 1601, happy their enemy’s enemy was a loyal friend to them, and certain the Jesuits and their purported treacherous dealings with Spain were the sole obstacle to religious tolerance in England, the Appellant priests Bluet, Bagshaw and Mush, accompanied by two others, Barneby and Champney, crossed the Channel to Paris. Anthony Copley would write of ‘the departure of the three B-ees [Bluet, Bagshaw and Barneby] onward into their exile and defence against these [Jesuit] hornets’. From Paris the party travelled to Rome, arriving there on 14 February 1602. On 5 March they had an audience with Pope Clement VIII and presented their demands to him. It did not go well. John Mush recorded in his diary Clement’s uncompromising view that religious toleration bred heresy and ‘that persecution was profitable to the Church’; he also recorded Clement’s anger at the Appellants for referring to Elizabeth as Queen, given that earlier Popes had deposed her. In fact, wrote Mush, all ‘we proposed seemed to dislike him’.
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Now followed months of painstaking negotiations in which both sides, Appellants and Jesuits, attempted to put their case to Clement. At this point a strange selection of allies came to the Appellants’ aid. First was the French ambassador to Rome, Philippe de Béthune. France had followed the arguments put forward in
A Conference
carefully—and had no wish to see a Spaniard on the throne of England. If the Jesuits were being identified as pro-Spanish, then it suited French interests to become pro-Appellant, albeit discreetly so as not to provoke Spain, and Mush confidently reported: ‘We are safe [from the Society and Spain] under the protection of the King of France.’ Next was the seminary priest Dr John Cecil, who had joined the Appellants in Paris, probably as their translator for the trip. Dr Cecil’s interest in their cause was as ambiguous as his career to date. Since leaving Oxford in the company of Nicholas Owen’s brothers, John and Walter, he had graduated from the English College in Rome and now divided his time between serving the mission on the Continent and serving the English Government at home. It was Dr Cecil who had provided his namesakes on the Council with their description of Southwell and their details of the Jesuits’ landing sites in England; he had also implicated the Jesuits in the plans to convert Ferdinando, Lord Strange. His motivation in all this, he wrote, was to show how a good Catholic could also be a good Englishman. More likely, his actions were informed by a strong, if unspecified, grudge against the Jesuits. But with him now pressing the secular cause and Béthune the French, Clement seemed more disposed to listen to the Appellants. In June Mush could write in his diary of a ‘favourable audience’ with the pontiff.
*
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The more Clement listened, though, the clearer it became that the Appellants’ case was built of straw. They could reiterate their demand that Blackwell’s ruling—that they were guilty of schism—be rescinded. They could petition for a bishop of their own. They could proffer the three demands that bore the Council’s stamp: that priests be banned from meddling in politics; that known plotters be removed from the mission; and that Catholics be obliged to reveal all plots against the Queen and the State. But they could give, in return, no details of the Government’s offer of religious tolerance. In June Bluet wrote to Bishop Bancroft in London, begging just ‘three lines of her Majesty’s hand’ to confirm her intentions. Bancroft duly forwarded the letter to the Council, but Elizabeth’s response was not forthcoming.
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With no room to bargain, the Appellants could do little else but continue their attack on the Jesuits in the hope Clement might recall the Society from England just to restore peace. Their methods were underhand. Back in March they had written from Rome, asking that a copy of Robert Southwell’s
An Humble Supplication
be sent to them: this copy, as they now presented it to Clement, was an expurgated version of the Jesuit’s text, specifically printed for their purpose. Gone from it were the tirades against Sir William Cecil and the criticisms of the English Government; what remained were the tributes to Elizabeth’s ‘goodness’ and ‘Princely virtues’ and the pleas for tolerance. With the balance of the book now distorted, the Appellants showed Clement that Southwell, like they, was loyal to Elizabeth, that he, like they, advocated negotiating with her Government, that he, like they, viewed his fellow Jesuits’ uncompromising stance as the only thing standing between England’s Catholics and freedom. The Jesuits were outraged. Henry Garnet attempted to prevent publication of the abridged text; Robert Persons petitioned the Pope, begging him ‘not to allow an undeserved aspersion such as this to be branded on [Southwell’s] reputation and memory’.
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In the end, after eight months of tortuous negotiations, Clement produced his final ruling on the dispute in the form of a papal brief, which can best be described as anti-climactic. So much hatred, so much invective had achieved so little. For the Jesuits, they had won a ban on Catholics having any further dealings with the English Government to the detriment of their co-religionists. For the Appellants, they had won nothing more than a ruling forbidding Archpriest Blackwell from communicating seminarian business to the Jesuits. Further, a Royal Proclamation, published the month after Clement’s ruling, indicated just how far they had ever been from achieving their hoped-for religious toleration. This Proclamation, issued at Westminster on 5 November 1602, reiterated Elizabeth’s stance against Catholicism, calling on all priests to leave England immediately or face the death penalty. As for those priests, it read, who insinuated ‘that we have some purpose to grant a toleration of two religions within our realm’, God, Himself, was witness to ‘our own innocency from such imagination’.
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Four hundred years after the event, what remains so intriguing about the Jesuit-secular dispute is not its outcome, so much as the motivation of its participants and the possibilities it raised. It was an unlikely, albeit predictable, coupling that saw Elizabeth and Pope Clement united in opposition to the principle of religious tolerance, but then this was just one of a number of unlikely couplings forged during the conflict. Bishop Bancroft, London’s leading prelate and a future Archbishop of Canterbury, was so active in his support of the Appellants’ publications that he would later be accused (unsuccessfully) of treason by the Puritans, for promoting Catholic literature. It was on a Bancroft-backed press, run by the Catholic William Wrench, that the abridged version of Southwell’s
Supplication
was apparently printed; Bancroft would later save Wrench from execution for ‘Traitorous’ book-running.
*
It was Bancroft who produced the papers allegedly revealing Jesuit treason, Bancroft who served as go-between in the Appellants’ negotiations with the Council, Bancroft who (most likely) led the investigation into the origins of the dispute. The bishop was no Catholic, but he was stridently anti-Puritan: the chronicler Lord Clarendon would later write that only an early death had prevented him from extinguishing ‘all that fire in England which had been kindled at Geneva’. His support of the Appellants would seem to have been as much an attempt to consolidate the forces of conservative Christianity against the Puritans, as it was a means of defeating the Jesuits. Whether or not the documents he showed Bluet, setting out the Jesuits’ treasons, were fake, genuine, or the product of inaccurate and alarmist information remains unclear.
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Also unclear is the extent to which the Council, now dominated by Sir Robert Cecil, Elizabeth’s Principal Secretary of State, was acting independently of Elizabeth in pursuing negotiations with the Pope. Cecil’s had tended to be a voice for peace on the Council. He was not averse to keeping information from the Queen in order to achieve this: he once instructed Lord Mountjoy, commander of the English forces in Ireland, to ‘write that which is fit to be showed to her Majesty, and that which is fit for me to know (
a parte
)’. If he hoped to oversee a smooth transfer of power from Elizabeth to whoever was destined to succeed her, then it was imperative he forestall Catholic resistance to that successor, resistance anticipated by the publication of
A Conference.
Indeed, for a time, it seemed, he even considered the Spanish Infanta’s claim to the throne: in 1599 he went as far as to commission secret portraits of her and her husband.
*
More realistic, though, was the possibility of his securing a guarantee of Catholic loyalty to the Crown in advance of James of Scotland inheriting, a solution that would unite all factions behind the strongest contender in the race. That he continued negotiating with the Appellants even after the publication of Elizabeth’s Proclamation (devising an oath of allegiance for them that repudiated the Pope’s power of deposition) suggests a determination on his part to bring Catholicism back into the fold, albeit in a limited way, for the sake of State security.
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And this remains the most tantalizing aspect of all about the dispute. For the Appellants had alerted Cecil to the fact that there
might
exist a solution to England’s Catholic problem, a solution that allied the twin forces of nascent English nationalism and inherent religious conservatism, to forge a new reduced English Catholic Church.
†
It was a solution that had its echoes in Catholic Europe: in the French Gallican tradition, which had always sought to limit the extent of the Pope’s temporal powers in France; in the reluctance of Catholic rulers to see the Council of Trent’s decrees, emphasizing Rome’s supremacy over them, published in their territories. If the Catholic nations of Europe could chafe at their Roman bit, aware of a conflict between their sovereign right to self-determination and the Vatican’s
ultramontanism
, then why should not the Protestant Government of a divided country hope to exploit this conflict? The Cecil-influenced
Protestation of Allegiance
, when it was finally delivered to Elizabeth at the end of January 1603, suggested how this might have worked. In it the Appellants swore to acknowledge Elizabeth as their true and lawful Queen and to defend her life and realm against all plots or invasions, even those carried out ‘under colour of the restitution of the Romish religion’. Here was the answer to the Bloody Question that the Government had longed for, unequivocal, enforceable in a court of law. Here was a Catholic-led movement to limit the bounds of papal supremacy, to place national security above awkward theological uncertainties, to place new England before old Christendom. That this movement was in a minority was indicated by the thirteen signatures, out of some four hundred seminary priests then in England, that the
Protestation
garnered.
*
That it attempted to codify the uncodifiable, a man’s loyalty to his God and his country, made its appeal limited. That it would have been stopped in its tracks by Elizabeth’s fear of religious tolerance, no less than by the Pope’s opposition to it, is unquestionable; its timing was not propitious. But its mere existence pointed to a possible way out of the cycle of paranoia and persecution into which England was locked; and, significantly, the Appellants had identified their Jesuit rivals as the main obstacle to that possibility. It remained to be seen what a Government looking for a way out would make of this.
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