The Watchers (15 page)

In June 1580 the Jesuit priests Robert Persons and Edmund Campion waited to cross from France to England. They had followed in the footsteps of Sledd on the roads from Rome. Campion was forty years old, a former scholar of Oxford University and a teacher at William Allen's seminary at Douai. In 1573 he had gone to Rome on foot to become a Jesuit, and then taught philosophy and rhetoric in Moravia and Bohemia before being called by Allen to Rome in 1580 for service in England. Now, preparing to sail across the English Channel, he disguised himself as a jeweller of Dublin. It was an effective cover, for Campion had spent a little time in the city. Persons, whom Anthony Munday had known in the English College, went first, dressed as a captain of soldiers: it was an extrovert gesture worthy of Munday himself. When Campion knew that Persons had crossed safely, Campion followed him.

For Campion it was a close-run thing. He came within a whisker of disaster. The searcher of Dover, the official whose job it was to check incoming ships and their passengers, had special orders to look out for Gabriel Allen, Doctor Allen's brother, who was understood to be travelling home to Cumberland. The mayor of Dover had a description of Allen, surely provided by Charles Sledd: about forty-five years of age, ‘of reasonable stature', with a flaxen-coloured beard. At first the mayor believed Campion to be Allen. But then without explanation he set the Dublin jeweller free. He must have been unsure. Sledd's description of Gabriel Allen was after all pretty meagre, or perhaps another ship had arrived carrying other likely suspects. Whatever the reason, at Dover Campion had a very lucky escape. He and
Persons were now free, for the time being, able to disappear into the Catholic underground of London. In its desperate efforts to track them down, Elizabeth's government began to chase shadows.

Neither Munday nor Sledd had ever met Edmund Campion, and it seems very unlikely that Sledd knew what he looked like. Sledd may have heard rumours, of course, though he made no report of ever having talked about Campion in Rheims, Paris or Rouen. True, Campion's significance was not yet clear. He was, like Persons, one of a number of missionary priests whose secret work in England would be immensely dangerous. But Edmund Campion, pursued for many months by the Elizabethan authorities and only captured by chance, would soon become the most powerful symbol of William Allen's war for souls.

Robert Persons and Edmund Campion took their own safety very seriously. They moved around England, meeting only occasionally. The risks, as Campion had experienced for himself at Dover, were high. In late June 1580 Campion preached in secret at Smithfield in London. A fortnight later he and Persons met other Catholic priests for a conference in Southwark, south of the Thames at London Bridge, in the shadow of the Marshalsea prison and within sight of the Tower. Under the noses of the authorities, Campion also set out on paper the aims of William Allen's mission as he saw them.

Campion wrote his statement as one of personal intent. ‘My charge,' he said, ‘is of free cost to preach the Gospel, to minister the Sacraments, to instruct the simple, to reform sinners, to refute errors, and, in brief, to cry alarm spiritual against foul vice and proud ignorance, wherewith my poor countrymen are abused.' He explained that his Jesuit superiors strictly forbade him ‘to deal in any respect with matters of state or policy of this realm, as those things that appertain not to my vocation'. The Society of Jesus, he wrote, had made a league (that is, an agreement) to carry any cross that Elizabeth's government chose to lay upon its priests ‘and never to despair your recovery, while we have a man left to enjoy your Tyburn, or to be racked with your torments, or to be consumed with your prisons'. ‘The expense is reckoned,' he wrote, ‘the enterprise is begun; it is of God, it cannot be withstood. So the faith was planted, so it must be restored.'

The letter was beautifully composed, poised and articulate, an elegant statement of belief and mission – so much so, in fact, that it instantly outgrew its original purpose. Campion prepared the letter for Elizabeth's Privy Council, to be sent only in the event of his
capture. The fact he left it unsealed meant that very quickly copies of it began to circulate, passing secretly between English Catholics. Campion's defence was, after all, a crafted weapon to be used in an extraordinary propaganda war. By October 1580 Robert Persons and a printer called Stephen Brinkley had set up a secret printing press a few miles out of London. Later, because of the danger of discovery, Brinkley and his assistants had to move it to a house in Oxfordshire. So Persons and Campion were able to speak to English Catholics in books secretly printed, bought and borrowed, while the two Jesuits, with other priests, moved around England to preach, say mass and hear confessions.

John Hart, the passionate preacher Charles Sledd had heard in Rheims and now a prisoner, was moved from the Marshalsea to the Tower of London at Christmas 1580. There he joined Sledd's former companions Robert Johnson, Thomas Cottam, Ralph Sherwin and Henry Orton. Luke Kirby, the friend of Anthony Munday at the English College in Rome, was held in the Tower also. The four priests and Orton had been there since 4 December.

The Elizabethan antiquary John Stow described how the Tower of London was at once ‘a citadel, to defend or command the city', a royal palace, a ‘prison of estate, for the most dangerous offenders', a royal mint, an armoury, a treasury for the queen's jewels and an archive for the courts of justice at Westminster. A contemporary of Stow's wrote that the judicial purpose of the Tower was ‘to discover the nature, disposition, policy, dependency, and practice' of offenders against the queen. The priests and other prisoners were guarded by thirty yeoman warders under the authority of a lieutenant, Sir Owen Hopton, a man of about sixty who had been in post for ten years.

The Tower of London was surrounded by a wide moat fed by the River Thames. Rising high above every other building was the White Tower, built by William the Conqueror in the eleventh century. Great defensive walls ran between the various towers and gates. St Thomas's Tower stood over the water gate to the Thames, near the wharf dividing the moat from the river. In the inner ward between the Beauchamp Tower and the Devereux Tower was the church of St Peter ad Vincula. Near the lieutenant's lodging, which was in the south-east corner of
the inner ward, stood the Bell Tower. Close to that was the main gate, from which one crossed the moat to the Middle Tower, on to the Lion Tower, and out to the city of London. Anyone lucky enough to be able to leave the fortress when the bell rang went from the Lion Tower through the bulwark gate and on to Tower Hill, looking north to the executioner's scaffold and east to Tower Street. Prisoners were often kept in the Beauchamp, Broad Arrow, Salt and Well Towers. Those who could not pay for their own lodging, fuel and candles were supported by the crown. Owen Hopton carefully kept and signed the accounts. Prisoners often carved their names into the stone of the walls. One man, James Typpyng, left an inscription in the Beauchamp Tower: ‘Typpyng stand or be well content and bear thy cross for thou art [a] sweet good Catholic but no worse'. Cottam, Hart, Johnson, Orton and Sherwin, kept in close confinement and frequently interrogated, left no marks on the walls of their chambers.

The priests were questioned about their loyalty and allegiance. The official record of what Ralph Sherwin said in his examination on 12 November 1580 is short, even blunt. Did he believe Pope Pius V's bull of excommunication against the queen to be lawful? Sherwin refused to answer the question. Was Queen Elizabeth his lawful sovereign, and should she continue to rule in spite of the Pope? Sherwin would not say. This interrogatory was put to him a second time. Knowing that he risked a charge of high treason for his answer, he prayed not to be asked any question that put him in danger. To Sherwin, in fear of his life, the questions were obvious traps in which he was caught however he answered. To his interrogators, the priest refused to answer plain questions about his loyalty as the queen's subject. They drew their own conclusions.

Not surprisingly, the priests' interrogators returned again and again to Pope Pius V's bull
Regnans in excelsis
, of 1570, by which Pius had denounced Queen Elizabeth as a bastard heretic schismatic and excommunicated her from the Catholic Church. John Hart was questioned about the bull. His interrogators knew that Pope Gregory, who supported the priests' mission to England, had confirmed Pius's bull. They knew, too, that only a few months earlier, in April 1580, Gregory himself had given the ‘faculties' of this confirmation to Robert Persons and Edmund Campion in Rome.

Hart told his interrogators that Pius's bull was still lawful. But he explained that Gregory had understood the difficulty faced by English Catholics who were caught between a Pope who commanded them not to obey the queen and their loyalty to Elizabeth. As Hart put it: ‘if they obey her, they be in the Pope's curse, and [if] they disobey her, they are in the Queen's danger'. And so Pope Gregory's dispensation allowed Elizabeth's Catholic subjects to obey her without putting their souls in peril. For Catholics this was potentially the untying of a very difficult knot. Significantly, however, Elizabeth's government did not see Pope Gregory's dispensation as any relaxation of
Regnans in excelsis
. In fact they took Gregory's action as proof that Persons and Campion had been charged to enforce Pius's bull against someone whom the Pope believed to be a heretic queen. Whatever they might say about their pastoral work as priests, as agents of the Pope their object (in the view of Elizabeth's government) was a political one.

On 31 December 1580, when he spoke of Pope Gregory's dispensation for English Catholics, John Hart was threatened with torture. Otherwise he, like Ralph Sherwin, may have chosen silence as the best course. Hart was taken to see the rack, the principal instrument of torture in the Tower, a large frame containing three wooden rollers to which the prisoner was bound by his ankles and wrists. The rack's purpose, simply and terribly, was to stretch the human body until it began to tear apart. The middle roller, which had iron teeth at each end, acted as a kind of controlling lock. This meant that the prisoner could be questioned while experiencing a constant amount of pain. It was probably a fairly simple device for even one man to operate. A number of officials, called commissioners, were present when a prisoner was tortured, of whom the lieutenant of the Tower was always one. Sometimes a clerk of the Privy Council would attend, often the man who had brought the torture warrant from the Council to the Tower. Lawyers, with their skills of taking and evaluating evidence, also served as commissioners.

Many Elizabethans would have associated torture with the terrible practices of the Spanish inquisition, or the Catholic persecution of Mary I. John Foxe's great ‘Book of Martyrs',
Acts and monuments
, had one woodcut of the racking of a Protestant prisoner in Mary's
reign. But the use of torture by Elizabeth's government became common in the 1580s. Some principles of its use were set out in a short pamphlet printed by the royal printer in 1582. The author of this official defence of torture was Thomas Norton, a London lawyer in his early fifties called so often to the Tower to interrogate priests on the rack that his enemies gave him the nickname ‘Rackmaster Norton'. Three of Norton's principles were that a prisoner was only ever tortured on the authority of a warrant signed by at least six members of the Privy Council; that no one was tortured for his faith or conscience; and that only a guilty man was ever put to torment. Norton's Catholic enemies hardly believed him. William Allen recounted the supposed exchange between Norton and John Hart in the racking chamber:

The title page of Thomas Norton's public defence of torture, 1583.

And when Master Hart was taken from the rack, the commissioners talking with him after a familiar manner: Norton asked him, saying, ‘Tell truly, Hart, what is the meaning of the coming in of so many
priests into England?' Who answered, ‘To convert the land again to her first Christian faith and religion, by preaching and peaceable persuasion, after the manner that it was first planted.' To which Norton said: ‘In my conscience, Hart, I think thou sayest truth.'

Allen's words suggest something of the sharpness and seriousness of the ideological clash between Elizabeth's government and its Catholic enemies.

For Elizabeth's government priests like John Hart were agents of a foreign power whose object was to remove a lawful monarch from her throne. They were traitors, and their torture was a necessary act of state. Thomas Norton wrote that no man ‘was tormented for matter of religion, nor asked what he believed of any point of religion,
but only to understand of particular practices for setting up their religion by treason or force against the Queen
'. The words in emphasis are critical: the full force of the law was being used against the
means
by which the Catholic faith was going to be brought back to England – by sedition, rebellion and invasion – and not against the faith itself. Catholic writers like Doctor Allen responded that this was simply a lie: theirs was a pastoral mission to save the souls of English Catholics in the face of vicious persecution, with the hope of turning England away from heresy and schism. Catholics likened Elizabeth's government to the authorities of ancient Rome who had persecuted early Christians, calling the queen's ministers ‘atheists' and ‘politiques'.