The Watchers (16 page)

By early 1581 Edmund Campion's brilliant and articulate defence of his mission was being read and passed around by people sympathetic to the Catholic cause. The authorities called it ‘Campion's brag'. It was a formidably persuasive, even an incendiary, piece of writing. One case reported to the justices of Southampton, and by them in turn to the Council, illustrates how influential it was. One William Pittes was alleged to have said that ‘great cruelty was used at this present by imprisoning of good men, whom he termed Catholics, affirming the prisons to be full of them in every place'. He thought Elizabeth ‘was deceived, and erred from the true faith'. His daily prayer was to bring her to the Catholic faith. Pittes asked a man called Lichepoole whether he had seen a copy ‘of a challenge made by one Campion'.
Lichepoole had not, so Pittes ‘immediately pulled out of his purse the copy of the said challenge, and read it unto the said Lichepoole, promising him a copy of the same'. The copy was made and delivered as Pittes had promised. This was the power of Edmund Campion's pen: he was proving a skilled and elusive general in the long war for hearts and minds, and a formidable enemy to Elizabeth and her government.

So dangerous, in fact, was ‘Campion's brag' that it had to be answered officially. Here Elizabeth's government ran the obvious danger of making Campion's letter even more widely known and read than it was already, but this was a risk the authorities were willing to take. One pamphlet was by William Charke, a combative Protestant controversialist, and it came off the press of Christopher Barker, the queen's printer, on 17 December 1580. Charke wrote of Campion's ‘insolent vaunts against the truth, joined with words pretending great humility'. Another attack came a month later from an Oxford theologian called Meredith Hanmer. He too exposed Campion's deceit, ‘where one thing is said in word, and the contrary found in practice and deed'. Campion, he wrote, had set the mother against her own son, the son to take armour against his father, the subject against the prince: ‘He hath deposed kings and emperors, he translated [altered] empires, he treads upon princes' necks, he takes sceptres and crowns from kings' heads, and trampleth them under foot.'

The fierceness of the attacks by Charke and Hanmer shows that Campion had the power to make his words felt, even if he himself could not be found. And all the time the temperature of the debate was rising. On 10 January 1581 a royal proclamation ordered the return of all English students from foreign seminaries and the arrest of all Jesuits in England. The intent and purpose of the seminaries, it said, was to pervert the queen's subjects in matters of religion and ‘from the acknowledgement of their natural duties unto Her Majesty'. Young English Catholics had been made ‘instruments in some wicked practices tending to the disquiet of this realm … yea to the moving of rebellion'. A new law made it high treason for a priest to absolve Elizabeth's subjects from their obedience to the queen and to reconcile them to Rome, even without a bull or other document from the Pope.

Laws like this so well expressed the sense of emergency and danger
gripping Elizabeth's ministers. Their consequence was that political loyalty to crown and government became impossible to disentangle from loyal worship in the Church of England. This was why the words of William Pittes concerning the cruelty used against Catholics and his prayer for Elizabeth's conversion to the Catholic faith were overtly political. What Pittes said and did was described by the justices of Southampton as a ‘matter of offence against the state' and government. Pittes survived his brush with the authorities. He may even have been the same William Pittes who in 1584 went off to William Allen's seminary in Rheims. Was he inspired by Campion? To Elizabeth's advisers the priests both in London's prisons and at large – and potentially also ordinary Catholics throughout England – presented a clear danger. Disturbingly persuasive, men like Campion were political agents of a dangerous and obviously hostile foreign power.

Not surprisingly, Campion was sought with ever-increasing urgency. He was always moving, always in disguise. He wrote in a letter: ‘I am in apparel to myself very ridiculous. I often change it and my name also.' Between Christmas 1580 and Easter 1581 he travelled through Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, Yorkshire and Lancashire. At the end of March 1581 he delivered a manuscript to Stephen Brinkley's printing press in Oxfordshire. Campion called it
Rationes decem
(
Ten Reasons
) and in it he set out Catholic faith and tradition. On 27 June four hundred copies of this very slim pamphlet were laid out on the benches of St Mary's church in Oxford for the scholars to read on the day they gathered to defend their theses. Done right under the noses of the authorities of his old university, it was an audacious publicity coup for Campion. Elizabeth's government was deeply unsettled. The priests were being pursued with energy and urgency. Eleven days before the scholars of Oxford read Campion's
Ten Reasons
, Robert Persons wrote secretly from London to the rector of the English College in Rome that ‘Sledd is on our track more than others, for he has authority from the royal council to break into all men's houses as he will and to search all places, which he does diligently, wherever there is a gleam of hope of booty.'

Some time after Midsummer 1581 Maliverey Catilyn, one of Sir Francis Walsingham's agents, was posing as a good Catholic somewhere
near the Sussex coast. Catilyn's speciality, as the coming years would show, was to go into prisons to spy on inmates, reporting their plots, schemes and conversations. His world was the Catholic underground, where he was well connected and trusted.

A Catholic view of Elizabethan persecution by Richard Verstegan, 1592: lay Catholics and a priest are arrested and imprisoned.

Catilyn explained to Walsingham by letter that he had met some bad men, yet one now came to travel with him ‘who exceedeth all the rest'. The man, whose name he did not give, ‘greatly pitied my case': presumably Catilyn, playing the poor Catholic, had told him a tale of woe. The man was careful, and he had refused to talk to Catilyn in the busy port town of Portsmouth. He was a sailor or the owner of a boat. He had been in France at Christmas, and in March 1581 he had brought back to England a priest called John Adams. Adams, as Catilyn knew, had been arrested at Rye and sent to Walsingham to be examined. The man had a brother (or a brother-in-law) ‘on the other side' who called himself Richard Thomas but whose real name was Gyles Whyte, from whom, Catilyn wrote, ‘he receiveth letters and books for his friends three or four times every year and they see things
are conveyed to another brother that he hath dwelling with a merchant at Billingsgate called Cox'. On his last journey Catilyn's new contact had brought back to England three Agnus Deis, small cakes of wax stamped with the symbol of the lamb of God and blessed by the Pope. One was for the shipmaster's wife, the second was for his mother and the third was for his sister. At Midsummer he had helped another priest to land secretly in England at Stokes Bay near Portsmouth, and given him directions on what course he should take. He also had in his keeping, Catilyn wrote, some jewels belonging to Edmund Campion: Campion, after all, had come into England disguised as a Dublin jeweller.

Maliverey Catilyn apologized to Walsingham for having to end his letter quickly. His new contact was near by. ‘He is here with me,' Catilyn wrote, ‘and therefore I think your honour would do well to see him.' Catilyn pardoned his scribbling. His companions, he said, ‘cry to me for speed', for they wanted to be in London that night, ‘and for the avoiding of suspicion I dare not be tedious'.

In early July Edmund Campion and Robert Persons were in Oxfordshire. On Tuesday, 11 July they parted. Campion and a fellow priest set out north for Lancashire. They would then travel to Norfolk. Persons and his man set off towards London, but before long Persons heard Campion galloping after him with a request to go instead to Lyford Grange in Berkshire, the house of Master Francis Yates, a prisoner in Reading jail, who had written to Campion to ask him to visit his family. Persons reluctantly agreed to Campion's detour, but he instructed him to stay at Lyford Grange for no more than a day, or one night and a morning. Campion did just that. The mistake he made was to return to the Grange a day later.

This was on 14 July, a Friday, the same day that two royal officials left London. Their names were David Jenkins and George Eliot and they carried a warrant ‘to take and apprehend, not any one man, but all priests, Jesuits, and such like seditious persons' that they should meet on their journey. They had decided to ride to Lyford Grange, a known Catholic house, where they thought they might discover priests. They wanted to arrive there at about eight o'clock on the morning of Sunday the 16th.

Jenkins was a pursuivant, a messenger of the queen's chamber. Wearing Her Majesty's livery, pursuivants executed warrants from the queen and her Privy Council. In the 1580s they were busy hunting for priests in London and putting Catholic recusants in prison. At times it was a dangerous job for which some pursuivants found financial compensation in bribery and corruption, either paid for letting people go or seizing the money of those they arrested. With men like Charles Sledd working with the pursuivants, they did not enjoy a high reputation.

The same could be said of George Eliot, Jenkins's companion on their journey to Lyford Grange, who called himself by the grand title of ‘yeoman of Her Majesty's chamber'. He had recently recanted his Catholic faith, confessing ‘the grievous estate of his life' to one of Elizabeth's most trusted and senior advisers, the Earl of Leicester. Eliot offered evidence of his good will. This was information, for having served in Catholic gentry houses in Essex and Kent, he was able to name names. Eliot did what Sledd had done in Rome, though less comprehensively: he compiled a catalogue of every Catholic gentleman and gentlewoman he knew in eight counties in England.

Eliot did something else which was irresistible in the emergency years of the early 1580s: he revealed the existence of a terrible conspiracy against Elizabeth and her ministers. Eliot told the Earl of Leicester of a plot to murder the queen and her leading councillors. He said that behind it all was a priest called John Payne, trained at Douai and ordained a priest in 1576, whom Eliot had known in Essex. Chief names were those of the Earl of Westmorland, rebel and outlaw, and William Allen. The plan was for fifty armed men, all paid for by the Pope, to assassinate Elizabeth while she was touring her kingdom on progress. Five men would kill the queen, while three groups of four would ‘destroy' Leicester, Lord Burghley and Sir Francis Walsingham. Leicester gave the paper to Burghley, who calmly noted in the margin ‘Payne to be examined'. Eliot also had information on how Catholic books were being sold secretly by two bookbinders in Paul's Cross churchyard. True or not, Eliot spoke to the anxiety of the moment. London was buzzing with news of books and pamphlets by and against the Jesuits. Eliot was believed, and by the early summer he set to work to infiltrate Catholic families he had not long before served.

Eliot was sure that he and Jenkins would find priests concealed at Lyford Grange. Thomas Cooper, whom Eliot had known in Kent, was Master Yates's cook at Lyford. Through Cooper they could enter the Grange without causing suspicion. Once in the house, they would conduct a search. Their plan was as simple as that. They had no idea that they would find at Francis Yates's house the most wanted man in England.

Jenkins and Eliot arrived at Lyford Grange on Sunday, 16 July at about eight in the morning, just as they planned. They found outside the gates of the house a servant who seemed to Eliot ‘to be as it were a scout watcher'. Eliot spoke to the servant, asking after Thomas Cooper, who came out to meet him and Jenkins. Eliot told Cooper a tale. He said that he was travelling into Derbyshire to see friends but had come far out of his way to Lyford because he longed to see him. Cooper invited him to the buttery for a drink. The cook asked Eliot about his friend, Jenkins, ‘whether … he were within the Church or not, therein meaning whether he were a papist or no'. Eliot answered that Jenkins was not a Catholic, but that he was a very honest man. Leaving Jenkins in the buttery, Cooper took Eliot through the hall, the dining parlour and other rooms to a ‘fair large chamber'. There he found three priests, of whom one was Edmund Campion. Also in the room were three Brigitine nuns (not as politically dangerous as priests but still illegal) and thirty-seven other Catholics. Eliot, committing to memory the faces and clothes of members of the congregation, heard Campion say mass. Then Campion sat down in a chair beneath the altar to give a sermon that lasted for nearly an hour, ‘the effect of his text being, as I remember, that Christ wept over Jerusalem etc. and so applied the same to this our country of England, for that the Pope his authority and doctrine did not so flourish here as the said Campion desired'.