God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests & the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot (12 page)

Gilbert was a twenty-eight-year-old Suffolk man of enormous independent wealth, an accomplished athlete, horseman and swordsman.
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He had been raised a strict Puritan but in Paris, where he had proved a great favourite at the French court, he had come under the spell of Catholicism. From Paris he travelled to Rome where, with religious instruction from Robert Persons, his confessor at St Peter’s Basilica, Gilbert converted to the old faith. On his return to England in 1579 he began to gather about him a group of like-minded and equally wealthy young Englishmen, ready to devote their energies ‘to the common support of Catholics’. Charles Arundel, Charles Basset (a descendant of Sir Thomas More), Edward Habington, Edward and Francis Throckmorton, Anthony Babington, Henry Vaux, William Tresham and John Stonor: all would give time and money to further the Catholic cause; several would give their lives. To what degree they had already begun working together as a secret society is the subject of dispute, but with Robert Persons’ arrival in London their enthusiasm now found new focus.
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Once settled in George Gilbert’s city headquarters, Persons began ‘to acquire a number of friends and to arrange with inns, with a view to staying in the country for a few days’. Then, with Gilbert’s aid and an escort to accompany him, Persons left London to ‘employ himself in the best manner he could to the comfort of Catholics’.
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Meanwhile, in St Omer, Edmund Campion had received Persons’ letter and was preparing for his own crossing to England. On the evening of 24 June the summer storms that had battered the Channel coastline for days finally let up and the waiting was over. Disguised as Persons’ jewel merchant friend and with Ralph Emerson acting as his servant, Edmund Campion set sail from Calais.
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At daybreak the following morning the port of Dover stood at red alert. Word had reached the Council that Gabriel Allen, William Allen’s brother, was returning to England to visit his family in Lancashire. Edmund Campion bore more than a passing resemblance to the wanted man. Campion and Emerson were dragged before the Mayor of Dover, cross-examined, then informed they were to be sent to London for further questioning. Then, for no obvious reason, the mayor changed his mind. Quickly, the two men left Dover, riding north to the Thames estuary before boarding a boat that took them upriver to the capital.
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Reaching London, they were still in some doubt as to what they should do next. Then a man detached himself from the waiting crowd at the quayside and stepped forward to greet them, saying, ‘Mr Edmunds, give me your hand; I stay here for you to lead you to your friends.’ The man’s name was Thomas James. He was a member of George Gilbert’s brotherhood of young Catholics and for several days now he had been keeping watch for the two men’s arrival. By nightfall Campion and Emerson were safely installed at Gilbert’s headquarters.
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On 6 April 1580, while Persons and General Mercurian discussed the details of their forthcoming mission and Campion hurried from Prague to Rome to join them, an earthquake hit London and the southern counties of England. ‘The great clock bell in the palace at Westminster strake of itself against the hammer with the shaking of the earth.’ Stones tumbled from St Paul’s Cathedral. In Newgate an apprentice was killed by falling church masonry. Meanwhile, at Sandwich in Kent the sea ‘foamed…so that the ships tottered’ and at Dover ‘a piece of the cliff fell into the sea’.
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In the weeks and months that followed, strange visions appeared in the skies above Cornwall, Somerset and Wiltshire—ghostly castles and fleets of ships, three companies of men all dressed in black, a pack of hounds whose cry was so convincing it drew men from their houses in readiness for the chase. In Northumberland hailstones rained down in the shape of frogs, swords, crosses and, worse, the ‘skulls of dead men’. And in Yorkshire and Huntingdonshire strange births were reported, monstrous creatures part human, part beast, to signify ‘our monstrous life’, wrote Holinshed, who chronicled the year with a baleful gloom. The arrival of the Jesuits, like the arrival of the Spanish eight years later, was preceded by many ominous portents (not surprisingly, perhaps, when the prevailing view among William Allen’s circle was that ‘two Jesuits should do more than the whole army of Spain’).
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And with the coming of these portents, the fear that had haunted the nation throughout the preceding decade grew stronger still. A future war with Catholic Europe now seemed a foregone conclusion. It was really only a matter of when and, specifically, with whom that war would be fought. Would it be with the Pope, who was already sending invasion forces to Ireland? With the Spanish, who seemed invincible? Or, closer to home still, with Scotland? In 1578 the pro-English and Protestant Regent to the Scottish throne, the Earl of Morton, had been forced to resign. Now the country was ruled jointly by the Earl of Arran and Esmé Stuart, the boy-king James VI’s favourite cousin, both of whom were pro-Catholic, pro-Mary and, worst of all, pro-French. Wherever you looked as an Englishman in 1580, to all points of the compass and to the very skies above your head, there were signs to trouble the bravest of souls. And set beside these general fears of imminent conflict was the more specific fear that while eyes and minds had been otherwise distracted England’s Catholics had been growing stronger.
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At the close of the 1570s the Spanish ambassador reported home to Philip II that ‘The number of Catholics, thank God, is daily increasing here [in England], owing to the college and seminary for Englishmen which your Majesty ordered to be supported in Douai.’ If this was designed to flatter, soon there were other reports flying backwards and forwards supporting the ambassador’s claim. Henry Shaw, one of Allen’s four proto-missionaries, wrote back to his mentor, ‘The number of Catholics increases so abundantly on all sides, that he who almost alone holds the rudder of state [Sir William Cecil?] had privately admitted to one of his friends that for one staunch Catholic at the beginning of the reign there were now, he knew for certain, ten.’ From Warwickshire the Earl of Leicester wrote to Sir William Cecil in alarm, to ‘assure your Lordship, since Queen Mary’s time, the Papists were never in that jollity they be at this present time in the country’. Meanwhile, the new Bishop of London, John Aylmer, warned Sir Francis Walsingham ‘that the Papists do marvellously increase, both in number and in obstinate withdrawing of themselves from the Church and service of God’.
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A nationwide census of convicted recusants, drawn up in 1577, offered the shocking proof that there was not a diocese in England that did not contain a number of Catholics steadfastly refusing to attend the Anglican Church. And for every Catholic who openly defied the law, it was believed there were many more still who publicly conformed to the 1559 Settlement while attending Roman mass in secret.
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It is difficult to know what to make of these reports. Offered in isolation, without other annual figures against which to compare them, there is little way of telling whether the Government’s 1577 findings show there to have been a significant growth in Catholic numbers, a change in Catholic behaviour (thanks to the influence of Allen’s missionaries), or simply (and most likely) an invigoration of the investigative process by which Catholics were being identified. Add to the mix a measure of Protestant paranoia and Catholic pride and it becomes still harder to get at the facts. But as the new decade dawned the widely held perception was that the number of practising—and thereby dissenting and potentially treacherous—Catholics had increased substantially. Here was a threat more specific and far closer to home than the potential invasion forces of Rome or Spain. And now, too, that threat could be personified. It had a name: a traitor and a turncoat’s name, the name of a former royal favourite and a courtier’s protégé, of the one-time ablest man in Oxford. As Privy Councillor Sir Walter Mildmay later testified in the Star Chamber, of all the ‘rabble of runagate friars’ there was ‘one above the rest notorious for impudency and audacity, named Campion’.
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News of Edmund Campion’s arrival spread quickly through the Catholic community, the buzz that had surrounded his name up at Oxford undiminished by his many years abroad. On 29 June at the Feast of St Peter and St Paul, just three days after his appearance in London, a huge audience assembled at the Smithfield house of Lord Norris, hired for the occasion by Lord Paget, to hear him speak.
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As a precaution, gentlemen ‘of worship and honour’, members of George Gilbert’s association, were set to guard the doors of the house against intruders, but no guard could halt the whispers now rippling through the busy London streets. It was not long before those same whispers had reached the ears of the Government’s informers.
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Soon spies were at work across the capital, detailed to ‘sigh after Catholic sermons and to show great devotion and desire of the same, especially if any of the Jesuits might be heard’. When Robert Persons returned from his preliminary tour of the country in early July he found Campion ‘retired for his more safety’ to Southwark and the situation a grave one, the searches ‘so eager and frequent…and the spies so many and diligent’. Clearly for Campion to remain longer in London was courting danger.
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But first the two priests had another problem to address, for it was not just the English Government that harboured suspicions about the Jesuits’ intentions. Some of England’s Catholics, too, though desirous to hear Campion and Persons preach, were less than happy to welcome the pair home for a prolonged stay. At a secret conference held in Southwark, near St Mary Overies (now Southwark Cathedral), Persons and Campion met with a panel of leading Catholic laymen and priests. Persons opened the meeting. He declared under oath that neither he nor Campion had been forewarned of the Pope’s Irish invasion—they had learned of the expedition only at Reims. Next, he read out the instructions for their mission, emphasizing that their orders strictly prohibited them from dabbling in ‘matters of state’. But his protestations failed to convince one of the attending priests, who now argued that the Catholics to whom he had spoken feared the Jesuits’ mission could only ever be viewed as political by the English Government. For the good of the faith, therefore, the pair should leave the country at once. Persons refused. The Jesuits had been expressly called to the mission. If they turned back now it would represent a decisive propaganda victory for Elizabeth and her Council. His argument won the day, but in the decades to come this conflict would become a full-scale and enervating war of attrition between the rival Catholic factions.
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The conference broke up not a moment too soon. Government agents were closing in on the venue. Charles Sledd, a former student at Rome who had found it profitable on his return to England to turn Protestant informer, recognized a face familiar from his college days—that of law student and known Catholic, Henry Orton, Persons’ guide on his earlier tour of the country, now travelling to Southwark to take part in the secret meeting. Sledd fell into step behind him, but before Orton could reach his destination Sledd had him apprehended. When, just a short while later, Sledd spotted the elderly Marian priest Robert Johnson making the same journey to Southwark, the informer’s suspicions were aroused. Once again Campion and Persons had a lucky escape. Sledd’s constable, growing impatient of the hunt, broke cover too soon and arrested Johnson some distance short of the meeting house. The time had come for the two Jesuits to leave London for the comparative safety of the open road.
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Each equipped with a pair of horses, a servant, travelling clothes suitable for a gentleman and sixty pounds of spending money—all provided by George Gilbert, who accompanied them on the first leg of their journey—Campion and Persons headed north out of the city to Hoxton, where they spent the night, possibly at the house of Sir William Catesby, a landowner with Catholic sympathies. The following morning they were surprised by Thomas Pound, who had successfully bribed his way out of the Marshalsea prison and had ridden through the night to intercept them. The prisoners had been talking among themselves, said Pound. If Campion or Persons were captured it would be an easy matter for the Government to paint them as traitors and political agitators. They must each, therefore, set down a declaration of their aims and the precise purpose of their mission, which Pound would safeguard for them. It seemed a sensible idea and the two Jesuits duly wrote out their statements, handing them to the waiting Pound before heading on their way. Persons sealed his paper; Campion left his open: a small character distinction that would have huge repercussions.
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Back in the Marshalsea, Pound read Campion’s document. He showed it to his fellow prisoners. Soon, copies of the text were circulating through the gaol, smuggled from cell to cell. Visitors to the prison carried transcripts away with them. The pages fanned out across London and to the countryside beyond, landing indiscriminately in the hands of friend and foe. Campion’s testimony, intended as a defence of his case
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in the event of his arrest, was now blowing through England like a campaign manifesto.
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Campion addressed the Privy Council directly and in measured tones at first. His return home to his ‘dear Country’ was ‘for the glory of God and the benefit of souls’. He was ‘strictly forbidden by our Father that sent me, to deal in any respect with matter of State or Policy of this realm’. He begged for a chance to defend the Catholic faith before the Privy Council and an assembly of judges and theologians, so certain was he that no one could fail to be persuaded of the rightness of his argument if they would only give him an ‘indifferent and quiet audience’. But then, in a flourish of rhetoric familiar from his Oxford days, Campion laid down a challenge that horrified his Protestant readers: ‘be it known to you that we have made a league—all the Jesuits in the world…—cheerfully to carry the cross you shall lay upon us, and never to despair your recovery, while we have a man left to enjoy your Tyburn’. Even now, gathered beyond the seas, were ‘many innocent hands’, all of whom were ‘determined never to give you over, but either to win you to heaven, or to die upon your pikes’. To Catholics it was a blast of hope. To Protestants, and to Elizabeth’s Government in particular, it was a war cry. If Campion had been a wanted man before, now he had become the official spokesman of the Catholic mission and a voice to be silenced at all costs.
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