God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests & the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot (44 page)

In the autumn of 1602 a foreign visitor to court watched the Queen taking the air, ‘walking as freely as if she had been only eighteen years old’. In her seventieth year there were few signs Elizabeth was slackening her pace. On her annual summer progress that year she went hunting ‘every second or third day, for the most part on horseback, and showeth little defect in ability’, wrote the Catholic Anthony Rivers. But witnesses close-up commented that she ‘looked very old and ill’. In October that year she dined with Robert Cecil. ‘At her departure,’ wrote Rivers, ‘she refused help to enter her barge, whereby stumbling she fell and a little bruised her shins.’
⁵⁴

That same autumn Henry Garnet sent a circular letter to the Jesuits in England, announcing Pope Clement’s ruling and celebrating the ‘sweet end of all the controversies which have so long molested not us only, but all other Catholics’. He instructed his men to lay the dispute behind them and urged them to be patient with their detractors. ‘And if with such patience we cannot obtain the quiet which we desire, the fault will easily be laid where it shall in deed be found’: ‘we have a particular obligation to give good example un[to] others’. The letter was a model of calm good humour and tact.
⁵⁵

Garnet had every reason to feel optimistic. In May that year he was able to write to Claudio Aquaviva that ‘The Catholics are increasing very greatly’. There had been no let up in the penal laws. ‘A few days ago’, Garnet wrote, ‘the Queen rebuked Canterbury sharply and ordered him to carry out real persecution. This, however, was not necessary since they were already proceeding with the utmost severity in all parts of the country.’ But even as the Government was tightening the screw, so the mission was winning more converts. Doubtless this had much to do with a certain theological hedging of bets. Three sets of religious settlements had come and gone now, and each had survived only so long as the ruler who had instituted it. The future of Elizabeth’s Church was no less uncertain. Garnet carried with him papal breves from Pope Clement, addressed to the Catholic laity and the missionaries, commanding ‘that none should consent to any successor upon Elizabeth’s death, however near in blood, who would not…with all his might set forward the Catholic religion’. These breves Garnet had been instructed to circulate on Elizabeth’s death, with the Pope’s authority. Robert Persons was now in communication with James VI of Scotland, backing his claim to the English throne (the Spanish Infanta had absented herself from the race). James, himself, was in communication—through various third parties—with the Pope, expressing an interest in converting to the Catholic faith. There was every reason for optimism.
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But for Garnet a new anxiety threatened. On 4 August that year he had written to Robert Persons, ‘I purpose about Bartholomytide [24 August] to travel to St Winifred’s Well for to increase my strength.’ St Winifred’s Well, in Flintshire on the North Wales coast, was ‘a standing miracle’, according to John Gerard. Legend had it that Winifred was beheaded defending her chastity; where her severed head fell, ‘a powerful spring instantly burst forth’; her head was then reattached and she had lived on as abbess to a religious house in Shrewsbury. The site of the spring—in what had once been an ‘arid valley’—had become an important place of pilgrimage: Richard I prayed there before the crusades, Henry V before Agincourt. And because the well was seen as medicinal as much as religious, the Reformation had not halted this tradition. Gerard wrote of the healing water: it was ‘extremely cold, but no one ever came to any harm by drinking it…I took several gulps of it myself on an empty stomach and nothing happened to me’. Many miraculous cures had been recorded there and for Henry Garnet, in need of such a cure now, the well had become a place of hope. Earlier that year he had fallen ill with signs of shaking in his limbs: he feared the onset of the palsy and paralysis. At the age of just forty-seven his body was failing him, even as English Catholics dared to look to the future.
⁵⁷

Elizabeth spent Christmas 1602 at Whitehall, amid great festivities. She had once remarked to James of Scotland that she knew the preparations for her funeral were complete; still she seemed in no particular hurry to take part in the event herself. In January she moved to Richmond and the weather turned colder. On 19 January Henry Garnet wrote to Claudio Aquaviva, asking him to prevent Catholics abroad—and Robert Persons in particular—from responding to Elizabeth’s November Proclamation against Catholicism. ‘If any answer be made,’ he wrote, ‘we wish the Secretary [Robert Cecil] to be spared as much as may be.’ Cecil, meanwhile, corresponded secretly with James and negotiated with the Appellants. By the end of the month the
Protestation of Allegiance
was ready to be presented to the Queen.
⁵⁸

At the beginning of February Elizabeth gave an audience to the Venetian ambassador, Giovanni Carlo Scaramelli, who wrote home suitably dazzled by the display she put on. She made no mention of the
Protestation
, then or subsequently, and soon other events had intervened to displace it from Government business altogether. At the end of February the death of the Countess of Nottingham, Elizabeth’s cousin, turned the Queen to a deep melancholy; ‘she has suddenly withdrawn into herself’, reported Scaramelli. She kept to her private apartments, refusing to leave them and refusing to take any of the medicines prescribed by her doctors. She lost her appetite and was unable to sleep. For days she sat motionless in her chamber, staring at the floor, her finger in her mouth. It was, wrote Scaramelli, as if her ‘mind was overwhelmed by a grief greater than she could bear’.
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On 9 March an English correspondent wrote to Robert Persons in Venice, telling him, ‘The Queen’s sickness continues, and every man’s head is full of proclamations as to what will become of us afterwards.’ That same day Henry Garnet noted, ‘The Queen is said to be very sick. Arbella [Stuart] is diversely reported of, and is like to be sent up for shortly, to be guarded.’ In London rumours were spread that the Council was stockpiling wheat in case of rebellion; Anthony Rivers wrote of a protective trench to be dug ‘from the Tower to Westminster for defence of the suburbs’. In Scotland James, receiving regular bulletins on Elizabeth’s health, cancelled a scheduled trip to the Highlands. Robert Carey, nephew to the dead Countess of Nottingham and a favourite of the Queen, arranged for fresh horses to be made ready for him the length of the journey from London to Scotland, and sent word to Edinburgh to expect him any hour. From The Hague, Sir Francis Vere, who had just received news that the Queen’s condition was serious, wrote to Sir Robert Cecil, saying, ‘I never thought to live to see so dismal a day.’
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On 21 March William Weston, in the Tower of London, noticed that ‘a strange silence [had] descended on the whole city…Not a bell rang out. Not a bugle sounded—though ordinarily they were often heard’. On 22 March Elizabeth was finally coaxed to take to her bed. By the following day she had lost the power of speech, though she listened attentively to the prayers read out to her by the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift. That night she slipped into a coma. She died between two and three o’clock on the morning of 24 March 1603. The diarist John Manningham recorded ‘her Majesty departed this life, mildly like a lamb, easily like a ripe apple from the tree’. By nine o’clock Robert Carey was clear of London and on the road north to Scotland and to James.
⁶¹

She left no will. She never officially acknowledged that James was to inherit—even to the last she was gripped by the fear of naming her successor—but by now few doubted this to be her intention. Accordingly, at ten o’clock that morning James Stuart was proclaimed King of England, Scotland, France and Ireland, first at Whitehall Gate, then by the High Cross in Cheapside an hour later, then at the Tower of London.
⁶²

When the reports of Elizabeth’s death finally reached Rome they announced that she had died ‘with great reluctance’; some added hopefully that she had died ‘a Catholic’.
*
‘God grant the last be true,’ wrote one commentator piously; ‘and the first also.’ Back in London, it took the remainder of that day, 24 March 1603, for any lingering sadness at her death to change to excitement. That evening bonfires were lit and the church bells were rung and their call taken up from parish to parish. Fire answered fire, peal answered peal as the royal messengers rode out across the country. Manningham recalled ‘every man went about his business, as readily, as peaceably, as securely, as though there had been no change, nor any news of competitors’. Of James, he wrote, ‘the people is full of expectation, and great hope of his worthiness’. It was a sentiment widely echoed. All ‘men are well satisfied’, wrote Simon Thelwal to his friend Mr Dunn in Bremen, Germany, and on everyone’s lips was talk of the ‘great hope of a flourishing time’. The Queen was dead. Long live the King.
⁶³

*
Ferdinando’s chief passion was the theatre. He kept a professional acting company, Lord Strange’s Men, who performed privately and publicly, at the Theatre in Shoreditch and the Rose Theatre on Bankside. At the latter they are believed to have presented Marlowe’s
The Jew of Malta
, written
c.
1590, and one of Shakespeare’s first plays,
The Comedy of Errors.

†
It seems the Government took none of this seriously: when, the following year, Elizabeth wrote to Derby, as Lord Lieutenant of Lancashire, informing him she was sending troops north against a rumoured invasion, there was little sign in her letter that she regarded him as a traitor.

*
Gerard’s great-great-grandmother was Margaret Stanley. The connection between Thomas Gerard and Ferdinando was hinted at in a report, claiming Gerard was ‘brother to one of his [Ferdinando’s] familiars’. Gerard, himself, makes no mention of ever having had contact with Ferdinando.

*
In a Spanish report of December 1587, detailing the religious disposition of England’s aristocracy prior to the Armada, Henry, fourth Earl of Derby was listed as ‘neutral’ along with the Earl of Shrewsbury. Shortly before Ferdinando’s death, leading Catholics assessed his beliefs thus: his ‘religion is held to be…doubtful, so as some do think him to be of all three religions [Protestant, Puritan, and Catholic], and others of none’.

†
Curiously, John Gerard’s cousin, Thomas, son of the former Master of the Rolls, Sir Gilbert Gerard, also benefited from Ferdinando’s death, becoming governor of the Isle of Man while Ferdinando’s heirs quarrelled among themselves as to who should hold the office. Government of the island had been given to Derby’s family by Henry IV.

*
John of Gaunt’s eldest daughter by his first marriage, Philippa, had married into the Portuguese royal family, from which the Infanta was also descended. John’s second marriage had been to Constance of Castille; his daughter from this marriage, Catherine, had married Henry, later King of Castille.

*
From 1594 to 1597 England suffered a run of four bad harvests in a row. In 1596 wheat was in such short supply that prices rocketed to 80 per cent above average; in 1597 they stood at 64 per cent above average.

*
On 30 November 1594 Young wrote to Elizabeth, thanking her for the messenger she had sent to visit him on his sickbed. ‘I think no subject in the world more infinitely beholden unto his Sovereign, in that in these my aged and extreme or last days it pleaseth you so favourably to respect the weak estate of so poor a vassal, weakened in body with infirmities, but so much revived in heart with your gracious remembrance of me.’ He enclosed with this letter the key to a small chest containing all the papers concerning Gerard’s arrest, ‘as the last fruits of all my endeavours’.

*
In a letter to William Cecil, Lord Vaux described himself as ‘the unfortunatest peer of Parliament for poverty that ever was, for even my Parliamentary robes are at pawn to a citizen’.

*
Percy was a relative newcomer to the Jesuit mission. He sailed for England in 1596, but was captured en route and handed over to the English authorities. He was imprisoned in the Bridewell, but escaped along with Richard Fulwood. In 1599 he was sent to assist Gerard at Harrowden, before moving to Gayhurst.

*
In 1584 Barnes was lent a hundred pounds by the university convocation to set up a press in Oxford; the Earl of Leicester was instrumental in securing a licence for him. Barnes’s first publication was John Case’s
Speculum moralium quaestionum
dedicated to Leicester and singing the praises of the new press, ‘which by your means our university has lately obtained’.

*
This was not just an English complaint. In the same letter Persons explains that ‘Spaniards, Frenchmen and Flemings and other nations’ were all concerned about the pernicious effects time spent in Rome had on their countrymen.

*
Wisbech was one of several castles chosen as detention centres in response to the 1577 census of recusants. The others were Banbury (Berkshire), Framlingham (Suffolk), Kimbolton (Huntingdonshire), Portchester (Hampshire), The Vize (Wiltshire), Melborne (Derbyshire), Hatton (Cheshire), Wigmore (Montgomeryshire) and Barney (Yorkshire). It seems that, for a time, the Government contemplated a policy of wide-scale internment, but in the end this policy came to nothing.

*
The terms secular and religious are, in this instance, false friends. The secular clergy were no less ‘religious’ than their religious counterparts. Rather the term defines them as being ordinary members of the clergy, not belonging to a specific religious order.

*
There exists a document, drawn up in the winter of 1600-1, probably by Richard Bancroft, Bishop of London, which lays out all the known facts of the dispute so far and suggests areas of further enquiry for the Government.