God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests & the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot (40 page)

The plan was as follows: Ferdinando was to be persuaded to convert to Catholicism and then pursue his claim to the English throne, with the backing of the Catholic Church. In all this, the least unconvincing aspect was Stanley’s selection of Gerard as the man most likely to get access to Ferdinando: the two were distant relatives. Moreover Gerard’s elder brother, Thomas, was a Lancashire neighbour of the Derbys at their family seat of Lathom House.
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But Stanley’s interest was no less familiar: he, too, was related to Ferdinando—and it appears to have clouded his judgement. It must have been a beautiful daydream for an unhappy Catholic exile, imagining one’s cousin occupying the English throne, but like most daydreams it failed to stand up to scrutiny.
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In the autumn of 1593, just days after the death of his father, Ferdinando was approached by a Lancashire man named Richard Hesketh, newly returned from the Continent and bearing a message from Stanley. Stanley’s instructions to Hesketh were to proceed tentatively at first: ‘declare unto him in general that your message concerneth the common good of all Christendom, specially our own country, and in particular himself’. Only if Ferdinando seemed ready to listen was Hesketh to come to the meat of the matter: that if the new earl agreed to convert, his ‘friends’ overseas were prepared ‘to offer him all their endeavour, services and helps…to advance him’. There was one proviso, though. Ferdinando had to press his claim now, before Elizabeth’s death, and with an army behind him, so as to forestall his competitors. If he hesitated, warned Stanley, he was lost, for ‘he hath many enemies that daily seek his overthrow’. Scenting treason, Ferdinando informed the authorities. Hesketh was hanged and the matter closed.
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Except that early in April the following year Ferdinando fell ill. He died on 16 April 1594, ‘tormented with cruel pains by frequent vomitings of a dark colour, like rusty iron…[that]…stained the silver Basins in such sort, that by no act they could possibly be brought again to their former brightness’. His dead body, it was reported, ‘ran with such corrupt and most stinking humours, that no man could in a long time come near the place of his burial’. The symptoms pointed to poisoning and suspicion fell on Ferdinando’s stable manager, who had absconded on the earl’s best horse the moment he took to his bed. But no one could believe the man was acting alone: Catholics were known to have approached Ferdinando, therefore, according to the logic of the time, Catholics must have killed him. Privy Counsellor Sir Ralph Sadler wrote darkly of Jesuit connivance, recording in his journal that whether Ferdinando’s death was ‘by their practice or no, God knoweth, and time will discover. But that so it was…there is nothing more likely.’
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In fact Ferdinando’s death would have benefited the Catholic cause little. He had already told the Government all he knew of the plot, moreover he had never been an enemy of Catholicism—rather, like his father before him, he was regarded as a religious neutral.
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If his murder was an act of Catholic revenge then it did little more than add to the general opprobrium in which the faith was already held. Ask
cui bono?
and the answer surely comes back, Ferdinando’s rival claimants.
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And in certain quarters rumours were soon being spread to this effect. First to be blamed was Sir William Cecil, who, two months after Ferdinando’s death, married off his granddaughter to Ferdinando’s brother, the new Earl of Derby. Bess of Hardwick, still pushing Arbella’s claim, had a fine time fielding accusations, notably against Ferdinando’s brother and against Francis Hastings, a descendant of the Plantagenets, but in her opinion Ferdinando’s demise was the result of his ‘making himself so popular and bearing himself so against my lord of Essex’. And, from Brussels, Hugh Owen, William Stanley’s alleged co-conspirator in the Cullen plot, wrote a surprising letter to Thomas Phelippes, the Government’s chief code-breaker, attempting to clear the Earl of Essex of any culpability in the affair. Perhaps it is significant then that the State papers reveal little effort on the Council’s part to track down Ferdinando’s killers. Tudor England had already borne witness to a wholesale massacre of pretenders to the throne under Henry VII and Henry VIII; against that, the death of Ferdinando Stanley, Earl of Derby passed almost unnoticed. Indeed, within the year it had been entirely eclipsed by the publication of a small book, revealing why the English succession had become the burning international issue of the day.
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A Conference about the Next Succession to the Crown of England
was composed in Flanders by committee, some time in late 1593, early 1594. It is an extraordinary piece of work, part Renaissance political theory, part propaganda. The first half treats with the notion of succession in the abstract, concluding that propinquity, though desirable in a claimant, is not founded upon any law of nature or divinity, but only upon human law, ‘and consequently may upon just causes be altered by the same’. ‘[I]t is not enough’, wrote the authors, ‘for a man to be next only in blood, thereby to pretend a Crown, but that other circumstances also must occur.’ These ‘other circumstances’ included the claimant’s suitability, both morally and physically, for the job.
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With this in mind, the second half of the book treats with all the individual pretenders in turn. And, tracing the bloodlines of successive royal houses back to William the Conqueror and picking apart the more recent House of Lancaster, the writers were able to add a number of new Spanish and Portuguese claimants to the mix, most notably Isabel, Infanta of Spain, descended from the Conqueror’s eldest daughter and from John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster.
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What had been a British affair had now become wholly pan-European. Not that this was news to anyone on either side of the Channel: after all, the royal houses of Christendom had always intermarried. Rather, it was the forensic way in which the committee examined the issues arising from government by ‘Strangers’ that left readers in no doubt that, in the race for the English Crown, the authors were backing the foreign competition over the home side: ‘it is the common opinion of Learned men’, wrote these particular learned men, ‘that the World was never more happily governed than under the Romans, and yet were they Strangers to most of their Subjects’. The book might insist upon its impartiality, listing the pros and cons of each claimant, but its bias seeps between the lines. The English claimants were individually insignificant, tainted by bastardy and unlikely to unite the country behind them; James was liable to fill the country with his Scottish followers and divide the spoils between them, causing resentment. The whole was a ringing, if tacit, endorsement of the Spanish Infanta.

It was a sound argument and a percipient one: the English claimants were insignificant, James would cause a degree of resentment by favouring his Scottish followers, England had been and would again be ruled by foreigners, to no greater or worse effect than when it had been ruled by monarchs regarded as English. In making ‘good and profitable Government’ their priority, the authors were only pleading England’s interests. In dismissing English jingoism as the ‘common vulgar prejudice of passionate men’, they revealed that they, themselves, were experienced expatriates who long ago had learned to ignore nationality in favour of shared ideals and beliefs. In laying out the international and sectarian context of the English succession, they were merely offering a timely wake-up call to the world that at stake here were the balance of European power and the future of the Church of England. But what stuck in English throats—and by late 1594 copies of the book had begun to cross the Channel into England—was that the authors were backing a Spanish claimant, the daughter of that same King with whom the country had been at war for almost a decade. And what was to prove altogether unswallowable was the fact that prominent among its authors—reportedly its author-in-chief—was Father Robert Persons, de facto leader of the English Jesuits. Not only were the Jesuits seeking the destruction of England’s Church, but they were also, it seemed, seeking to turn England into a Spanish colony: it was a belief that would unite Catholics and non-Catholics in joint opposition to the Jesuits and split the cause of English Catholicism to its core.

The remaining years of Elizabeth’s reign would be played out against a backdrop of vitriol, bitter infighting, and a quite bewildering tangle of political manoeuvring and back-stabbing among the missionaries. But to put this in its rightful context, they would also be played out against a backdrop of vitriol, infighting, and back-stabbing among the power-brokers of Europe, as each tried to make capital from the arguments put forward in
A Conference.
The sixteenth century was going out, not with a whimper, but with myriad voices raised in complaint, or plotting in the corridors of government. And, as so often in this century, they were all talking about religion.

Some time in the summer of 1598 John Gerard headed north out of London in secret. Since his escape from the Tower the autumn before, he had remained closeted in the capital while Henry Garnet decided his immediate fate. For a time the Superior considered sending him overseas in case the search for him intensified, a piece of news Gerard received badly: in March Garnet reported to Robert Persons that ‘John Gerard is much dismayed this day when I wrote to him to prepare himself to go.’ Garnet, too, was reluctant to lose him: ‘he is very profitable to me’, he told Persons. In the ten years since Gerard’s return to England the raw and undisciplined new recruit had become, after Garnet and next to his fellow traveller Edward Oldcorne, the most senior man on the mission. He had shown initiative and daring; he had withstood torture; providence favoured him. At just thirty-three years of age there seemed no limit to what he might achieve for the mission. It would have been hard to let him go. So Gerard stayed. Safety, though, dictated he could now best serve the mission in some part of the country where his face was unknown, so, on an unspecified date, he left London for a new base in Northamptonshire.
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He rode through a landscape blighted by bad harvests and by the relentless pinch of war.
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Five years earlier, in the summer of 1593, the peace-mongers within the Government, led by the Cecils, had taken the unlikely step of contacting William Allen in secret (and through a third party) to try to bring the conflict to an end. Allen’s brief was to enquire of the Pope whether an offer of religious toleration to England’s Catholics might open the proceedings for a settlement with Spain. Allen’s response had been jubilant. ‘I could think no otherwise’, he wrote, ‘but that God himself hath stirred up in their hearts this motion…I am not so estranged from the place of my birth most sweet, nor so affected to foreigners that I prefer not the weal of that people above all mortal things.’ It only needed the Government to let him know ‘how far and in what sort they of themselves would condescend in matters of religion’ for him to approach the Pope and, through him, Spain, to set the talks rolling. Sadly, Allen’s jubilation came to nothing. It is unclear at what point negotiations stalled, but stall they did and the war continued. But set against this continuity were the many details that had altered during Gerard’s time in prison.
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For a start the old order was changing. Catholics had always held that it was Elizabeth’s ministers who were responsible for the worst of the laws against them, rather than Elizabeth herself; now those same ministers were elderly men advancing haltingly towards their graves. Leicester had died in September 1588, Sir Francis Walsingham in 1590; 1596 saw the death of one of the most prominent of the hardline Protestants in Elizabeth’s Government, Sir Francis Knollys; and, even as Gerard rode north, the chief architect of Elizabeth’s reign, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, was fading. He died on 4 August 1598, aged seventy-eight. Elizabeth responded ‘grievously, shedding of tears’.
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There had been another death too. Richard Young, chief magistrate of Middlesex, had been called out ‘one rainy night [in November 1594], at two or three o’clock…to make search of some Catholic houses’. John Gerard described the event with little regret: ‘The effort left him exhausted: he became ill, contracted consumption and died.’
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And not dead, but fallen from grace, was Richard Topcliffe, Elizabeth’s priest-hunter in chief.
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Topcliffe’s career had always been marred by incident. In the early 1580s he had quarrelled sufficiently violently with the Lord Chief Justice, Sir Christopher Wray, for it to be recorded in the State papers. In January 1585 there were reports of a scuffle between Topcliffe and one of the Earl of Shrewsbury’s men, taking place near Temple Bar. But by 1594 the priest-hunter had begun to overreach himself. In November that year he sued a young man named Thomas Fitzherbert in the Court of Chancery for money he claimed Fitzherbert refused to pay him. Henry Garnet recounted the proceedings to Persons: ‘Topcliffe and Tom Fitzherbert pleaded hard in the chancery this last week. For whereas Fitzherbert had promised, and entered into bonds, to give 5000 [pounds] unto Topcliffe if he would prosecute his father and uncle to death…Fitzherbert pleaded that the conditions were not fulfilled.’ His father had ‘died naturally’, albeit in the Tower and under suspicion of treason, while his uncle was still alive and well and in prison. A witness came forward to tell the court of the ‘devices’ set to entrap the pair and Attorney General Coke testified that ‘Topcliffe had sought to inform against them contrary to all equity and conscience.’ The matter was put over for ‘secret hearing’, but the outcome went unrecorded. Whatever it was, it did little to improve Topcliffe’s temper. Around Easter the following year he made a series of unspecified allegations against Lord Keeper Puckering, accusing several Councillors of bribery into the bargain, and was led off to the Marshalsea for contempt of court.
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