God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests & the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot (7 page)

Through the north gate they streamed. Down Northgate Street (now Cornmarket), where the scholars who lined the road sank awe-struck to their knees and called out
Vivat Regina Elizabetha,
hearing their cry taken up by the townspeople leaning from the windows and crammed precariously together on the roof-tops above them. To Carfax, where Giles Lawrence, Oxford’s Regius Professor, welcomed the Queen with an oration in Greek to which Elizabeth responded warmly in the same tongue, thanking Lawrence for his speech and praising it as the best she had heard in that language, adding coyly ‘we would answer you presently, but with this great company we are somewhat abashed’. Lawrence was transfixed.

On down Fish Street (St Aldates) the procession flowed, to Christ Church College, where the gate and walls were festooned with verses in Latin and Greek in admiration of Elizabeth and where, beneath a canopy borne by four Doctors of the university, the Queen was ushered slowly across the quadrangle into the cool and calm of the great cathedral. Here Elizabeth knelt in prayer as Dr Godwin, Christ Church’s Dean, gave thanks for her safe arrival in the city. To the sound of cornets the choir sang the
Te Deum
and then wearily Elizabeth slipped away through the gardens in the lengthening dusk, to her lodgings in the east wing, to prepare for this, her latest charm offensive.

It was the Queen’s first visit to Oxford. An earlier attempt two years before had been called off at the last moment when plague broke out in the city. But this delay merely ensured that by the time Elizabeth made her dramatic appearance at the north gate anticipation had grown to fever pitch. It also meant that those charged with arranging the visit had left little to chance.

On the Wednesday before the Queen’s arrival the Earl of Leicester and Sir William Cecil had ridden the eight miles from the Palace of Woodstock to Oxford, through the sluicing rain of a late summer downpour, to check for themselves that everything was in order. Leicester, as Oxford’s Chancellor, was host for the week and with his ambition to marry the Queen still intact at this date—just five years earlier, with his brother-in-law acting as go-between, he had approached the Spanish ambassador and offered to return England to the Catholic Church if Spain backed their wedding, a far cry from his later reincarnation as the scourge of English Catholicism—there was more at stake for him here than mere proprietorial embarrassment should Oxford’s hospitality fail to please the Queen. But for Sir William Cecil, Elizabeth’s Principal Secretary of State and her chief adviser on all policies relating to Church and foreign affairs, Oxford’s performance was a matter for greater concern still.
³²

Each day of the royal visit Elizabeth and her entourage would attend debates and disputations, the art of which formed the basis of every student’s education. On the Tuesday a rising young Oxford star, Edmund Campion of St John’s College, would triumph in the Natural Philosophy Disputation, proposing ‘that the tides are caused by the moon’s motion’. Elizabeth, who in later life would be revered as the moon goddess, Cynthia, the ‘wide ocean’s empress’, was delighted with Campion’s speech; Cecil and Leicester immediately offered to become his patrons.
*
But it was indicative of the Government’s continued anxiety over the problem of Oxford’s religious insubordination that Cecil had provided the students in advance with a list of preferred subjects for these debates. Thursday’s Divinity Disputation took as its Council-chosen theme ‘Whether subjects may fight against wicked princes?’, allowing little scope for awkward theological reasoning.
†
It would have been a brave—and short-lived—undergraduate who dared to denounce Elizabeth’s break with Rome as wicked to her face; more embarrassing and more damaging still to the royal party would have been a spirited and unopposed defence of the Catholic faith. Oxford’s young students were to be given little opportunity to air their religious grievances.
³³

But Elizabeth favoured the carrot over the stick whenever possible. In addition she held a deep and unshakeable regard for learning and was determined to see Oxford back in the vanguard of European scholarship after so many decades in the wilderness of religious upheaval.
*
She had a captive audience of some seventeen hundred students—all of whom had elected to remain at the university despite the term being officially over—and if any queen knew how to entrance an audience it was Elizabeth.
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So Edmund Campion won his court patronage. George Coriat won half a sovereign. Tobie Matthew of Christ Church won the coveted title of Queen’s Scholar, which led to a lifetime of royal preferment and his eventual appointment as Archbishop of York. And all of them won the lavish praise and attention of a queen acutely conscious that her visit needed to serve as a fast-acting panacea for the ills afflicting Oxford. There was banqueting each evening and boisterous theatre in Christ Church’s Great Hall, transformed for the occasion into a gleaming, golden ‘Roman palace’. And then there was Elizabeth’s own speech, given at the church of St Mary the Virgin before the entire university on the final evening of her stay—a speech delivered in faultless, eloquent Latin, a speech in honour of Oxford and of academia, a speech that was welcomed and applauded with unqualified enthusiasm.

As Elizabeth rode out of Oxford the following day, surrounded once again by her glittering procession and by a city liberally hung with verses expressing grief at her departure, she had done much to heal the old wounds left by her father and her brother’s brutal and bullish enforcement of religious change. Her leave-taking was as sincere as it was warm: ‘Farewell, the worthy University of Oxford; farewell, my good subjects there; farewell, my dear Scholars, and pray God prosper your studies.’ Few could have done better under the circumstances. The only problem was it had all taken place several years too late.

Five years before Elizabeth’s visit a twenty-nine-year-old Lancastrian, a one-time student of Oriel College and former principal of St Mary’s Hall, had left Oxford for Flanders and the Low Countries. There, he was a welcome addition to the exiles of Louvain. And there, just seven years later, at the university town of Douai in the province of Artois, he would rent a ‘large…and very convenient’ house from where he would attempt to turn the ebbing fortunes of English Catholicism. ‘We cannot’, he would later write, ‘wait for better times; we must act now (to make them better).’ If the recalcitrant students of Oxford were to be summarily expelled from college whenever Europe threatened and if the men and women of England were to continue compromising their salvation in the name of political survival, then Dr William Allen had found the answer: use the former to educate the latter. It was a simple solution and it would prove devastatingly effective.
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*
When Thomas Cromwell was made Chancellor of Cambridge in 1535, on the execution of Cardinal John Fisher, Oxford graduates saw Government preferment steered past them towards the students of Cambridge.

*
Each college was provided at its foundation with an external ‘visitor’—part trouble-shooting ombudsman, part spiritual inquisitor.

*
De Feria believed that the leading Catholics, in both the Commons and the Lords, had failed to put up a convincing fight during the crucial parliamentary debates from which the settlement sprang. However the Catholics were also under-represented in these debates: ten out of the twenty-six bishoprics were empty when Parliament opened on 25 January.

*
Mrs Williams of the Swan was more than usually defiant in receiving Catholic priests: her husband was a justice of the peace and a city alderman.

*
England’s sense of growing isolation from the rest of Europe, in spite of these entanglements, features strongly in the State Papers of the time. The Spanish ambassador reported back to Philip II a speech made by Sir William Cecil to the House of Commons in 1563, in which Cecil declared, ‘They had no one now to trust but themselves, for the Germans, although they had promised the Queen great things, had done nothing and had broken their word.’

*
She is depicted as such in the
Rainbow Portrait
of
c
.1600 and was the subject of Walter Ralegh’s
Book of the Ocean to Cynthia,
in which he describes the anguished nature of his relationship with the Queen.

†
Cecil’s own choice of suitably non-controversial debating matter for the week ahead was ‘Why is ophthalmia catching, but not dropsy or gout?’

*
At the start of the sixteenth century Erasmus had placed English learning second only to that found in the Italian universities. Elizabeth’s concern over the standard of education in England extended as far as exempting schoolmasters from paying tax.

Three

‘The very flower of the two universities, Oxford and Cambridge, was
carried away, as it were, by a storm, and scattered in foreign lands.’

Edward Rishton, 1585

T
HE
1560
S ENDED
with a warning clap of thunder, audible across France and all the way to distant Spain. Rebellion! As the Catholic nations of Europe listened in, England rang to the sounds of revolt.

The uprising was led by the powerful northern earls Percy and Neville, names guaranteed since the Wars of the Roses to strike fear into the heart of any English monarch, let alone one as vulnerable as Elizabeth. Their rebellion marked the last dying gasp of the old feudal order. More than that, it was the angry response of a disgruntled aristocracy, shouldered out of its long-held place in the sun by middle-class
arrivistes
like the Queen’s chief minister Sir William Cecil. The Percy/Neville proclamation raged against those ‘evil disposed persons, about the queen’s majesty, [who] have, by their subtle and crafty dealing to advance themselves…abused the queen, disordered the realm, and now, lastly, seek and procure the destruction of the nobility’.
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But to rally supporters to their cause the rebels cloaked themselves in the flag of Catholicism. They marched to Durham Cathedral where they tore up the new English Prayer Book and Bible, demanding the restoration of ‘the true and catholic religion’. If this was what it took to spur the slumbering northern counties into action behind them then Percy and Neville were more than happy to make it their campaign slogan—neither man felt any long-standing loyalty to the new Church. Hidden further down the list were their more sought-after demands: the immediate arrest and trial of Cecil and the release from prison of the disgraced Duke of Norfolk.
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Elizabeth’s response was swift and uncharacteristically brutal. Between 500 and 800 men, all of very little account, were rounded up and executed. Percy and Neville fled the country and the decade closed on a note of queasy anticipation. It did not help that since 1568, Mary Queen of Scots had been living in England as Elizabeth’s prisoner. This was the Mary, half Scottish, half French, wholly Catholic, who had claimed Elizabeth’s crown as her own some ten years earlier. Mary had lost her French throne on the death of her first husband, her Scottish throne on the murder of her second. Now separated from her third husband, there were many who thought that, as Elizabeth’s presumed heir, she was entitled to another throne yet—England’s.

Then in February 1570 a new Pope, Pius V, a fanatical firebrand of great zeal but uncertain common sense, took it upon himself to fuel the conflagration further. He issued his bull
Regnans in Excelsis,
excommunicating ‘Elizabeth, pretended queen of England’, releasing English Catholics from their allegiance to her, and openly encouraging her overthrow, an appalling concept in a world that believed in a monarch’s divine right to rule. And the rulers of Europe were duly appalled, particularly as none was at present in the position to make good Pius’s threat. Philip II of Spain refused to let the bull be published anywhere in his dominions, openly reassuring Elizabeth that he had no intention of breaking the Anglo-Spanish amity. Privately, he complained that the Pope had ‘allowed himself to be carried away by his zeal’. The Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian fired off an angry response to Pius, receiving in return the peevish reply: ‘Why she [Elizabeth] makes such a stir about this sentence we cannot quite understand; for if she thinks so much of our sentence and excommunication, why does she not return to the bosom of the Church, from which she went out? If she thinks it of no consequence, why does she make such a stir about it?’
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But Pius had achieved what Protestant Parliamentarians had so far only dreamed of. In showing that a strict adherence to the Catholic faith was now mutually incompatible with loyalty to Elizabeth, he had bound Anglicanism to Englishness more firmly than ever. And he had given to an anxious English nation the cast-iron proof that the more devout the Catholic, the more danger they presented to the realm. The problem for England’s Catholics was that as the roots of Elizabeth’s new Church began to take hold, the only active Catholics left in the country were, perforce, devout ones. When Edwin Sandys, Bishop of London, opened the Parliamentary session of 1571 with a sermon at Westminster Abbey warning ‘This liberty, that men may openly profess diversity of religion, must needs be dangerous’, he revealed just how important to the nation’s sense of security a solid connection between Church and State had become. He continued, ‘One God, one king, one faith, one profession is fit for one Monarchy and Commonwealth. Division weakeneth.’
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Paranoia ran rife throughout the 1570s, stalking through the courts of Europe, trailing terror and swift acts of bloody reprisal in its wake. In 1572 some two thousand French Protestants were slaughtered by their Catholic countrymen in Paris on St Bartholomew’s Eve, an act that imprinted itself indelibly upon the consciousness of every European Protestant; the French Catholics responsible claimed they had attacked only because they thought they were about to be murdered themselves. Continent-wide, an epidemic of fear and suspicion was spreading. The ideological gulf between Catholicism and Protestantism had reached unparalleled proportions. For the Protestants, the sight of a renewed and invigorated Catholic Church—leaner and keener since the Council of Trent had given it a much needed shake-up—lent substance to the rumours that the Catholics were regrouping for a crusading attack against them.
*
For the Catholics, meanwhile, the consolidation of the Protestant position only increased the fear that this insidious spread of revolutionary thought would continue, destroying the traditional structure of the civilized world and consigning everyone in it to the fires of hell. Not surprisingly there was little room for compromise. The very words ‘Papist’ and ‘Heretic’ carried sufficient emotional charge to unite one side in loathing of the other.
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