God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests & the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot (45 page)

*
Copley, a born rebel, disgraced himself in Rome by appearing at the English College to preach a sermon with a rose between his teeth. He returned to England on a State pardon and, for a time, settled down quietly to write poetry; Southwell’s death seems to have removed the chief restraining influence on him.

*
Notes taken by Francis Bacon during Henry Walpole’s interrogation reveal John Cecil was known by Catholics to be a Government spy; Bacon warns the Council to be chary in its employment of him in future. Yet knowledge of Cecil’s spying still did not prevent the Pope from recommending his services to the Queen of France in 1616. Few facts illustrate the ambiguity of Cecil’s activities more clearly.

*
Henry Owen was associated with Wrench’s press for a time and in March 1605 he and Wrench were both indicted for recusancy in the London parish of St Bartholomew the Great. Curiously, the same Puritan printer who accused Bancroft of treason also testified that the authorities had allowed Owen to run his press in the Clink, while a Government informer alleged that he had been asked to turn a blind eye to Catholic books in Owen’s possession. Any direct connection between Bancroft and Owen is unknown.

*
Cecil was later accused by his chief rival the Earl of Essex of being pro-Spanish and was forced to deny to James, in the first of a series of letters written to the Scottish King in advance of his succession, that he ‘was sold over to the Spanish practice’.

†
It must be emphasized that this was never the Appellants’ aim: for all its political under-currents, the Jesuit-secular dispute remained an ecclesiastical conflict and the Appellants never lost sight of their core demand, that they be rid of an Archpriest they believed wholly to be in the Jesuits’ pocket. Even during their last negotiations with Robert Cecil over the oath of allegiance, they refused to cede any of their priestly powers in return for greater liberty of conscience. To simplify the dispute into a contest of identity between the nationalist seminary priests and the internationalist Jesuits is to misrepresent it.

*
Author-in-chief of the
Protestation
was William Bishop, the seminarian who, back in December 1581, had landed at Rye harbour and so failed to convince the port authorities of his false identity. In a report of 1600 he was described as ‘tall of stature, flaxen hair, broad-faced, somewhat pale, somewhat gross, and enemy of Jesuits’. In February 1623 the Appellants’ demands were finally met when he was created Bishop of Chalcedon, Vicar Apostolic of England, in charge of the seminary mission. He died on 13 April 1624.

*
Scaramelli, the Venetian ambassador, also reported Elizabeth’s supposed deathbed conversion, in a report home to the Doge. ‘[F]rom her remarks and from her prayers that God would not reckon against her in the next life the blood of priests shed by her, there are some Catholics about court who think that in her inner sentiments her Majesty was not far from reconciliation with the true Catholic faith. This view is confirmed, because it was observed that in her private chapel she preserved the altar with images, the organs, the vestments which belong to the Latin rite, and certain ceremonies which are loathed by other heretics…All this stabs the heretics to the heart, and they would fain silence the report, though all agree that the Queen died as she had lived.’ Scaramelli concluded: ‘Be that as it may, she died a Queen who had lived for long, both gloriously and happily in this world. With her dies the family of Tudor.’

Eleven

‘they sucked in the sweet Hopes of Alteration in Religion,
and drunk so deep thereof, that they were almost intoxicated.’

Arthur Wilson
(The Life and Reign of James,
the First, King of Great Britain)

O
N
23 J
ULY
1603, his first summer in England, King James I went hunting with the French ambassador. Afterwards, the two men sat down to a discussion about religion and James raised the subject that had preoccupied him for some time now, that of brokering a permanent peace between the Protestant and Catholic Churches. His plan, as the ambassador described it, was to convene ‘a general Council…in a neutral place and with free access’, made up of persons of virtue and learning. He would undertake to bring the Protestant party to the table in a spirit of amity. His question was, could the Pope be persuaded to agree to such a council and to attend it in a similar spirit? The ambassador duly reported the conversation to Henri IV of France.

Henri, once a Protestant, now a Catholic, walking embodiment of the possibilities of spiritual rapprochement (or a protean hypocrite, depending on your point of view) and, like James, a man who had suffered the worst extremes of his country’s changing religious fortunes at first hand, sent back a positive if muted response. ‘You can say to him’, he wrote to his ambassador, ‘that I will always be very glad and happy to support and assist [him].’ He shared the Scotsman’s belief that the peace of Christendom would ‘never be firm and assured so long as the discord in religion is such as we see at present’, but in terms of practical suggestions he had none (a result of his own failure to organize a similar forum in France in the 1580s and 1590s).
¹

Four months later James contacted Pope Clement VIII directly, saying ‘we do especially desire a general Council’. A year later a leading member of the Spanish Council would reiterate this plea on James’s behalf, noting the sincerity of the demand and that it had ‘the approval of a large part of the [English] Catholics’. To all these requests the Vatican remained deaf. Cardinal Aldobrandino, Clement’s nephew, produced a long list of procedural difficulties—who would preside over a council? where would it meet? when would it meet?—as evidence for why James’s request was impractical. Clement, himself, was uncompromising and not a little peevish: Henri IV had converted without need of a council, so why was it so necessary for James to talk?

James, who liked nothing more than to talk, was furious: two years later he was still complaining about the insult to the Venetian ambassador. But the little flurry of letters back and forth had been revealing. First, it suggested that the governments of England, France, and Spain, whose complicated
ménage à trois
had all too often been played out on the battlefields of Europe and who were never short of matter to quarrel over, were tired of using faith as a reason to fight. Political and economic pragmatism was replacing raging religious militarism as the cause closest to their ministerial hearts. Second, it suggested that the Vatican was crucially, painfully unaware of this. It remained to be seen who else had failed to spot the shift.
²

But in the absence of an official forum for talk, talk, itself, ran riot. Rumour, exaggeration, and misrepresentation all flourished unchecked in James’s England, fuelled by James’s own willingness to use them as political tools. They contributed to a dangerous, potentially fatal gulf between perception and reality. And into such a gulf a man might all too easily fall and come to grief.

‘The King of Scotland has succeeded quietly,’ wrote the Venetian ambassador in Rome, back to the Doge and the Senate some fortnight after Elizabeth I’s death. The Venetian ambassador to London, who earlier (as Elizabeth lay dying) had noted the arrest of sixty of the city’s most prominent Catholics in anticipation of rebellion, now told of their prompt release from prison. The French ambassador to London contacted his counterpart in Spain to marvel at the ease with which James had taken possession of the Crown, ‘though for years’, he wrote, ‘all Christendom held for certain that it must be attended with trouble and confusion’. Of James’s reception as ruler, he added, the ‘satisfaction is universal among the English, and so miraculous is the unanimity of the King’s own nation that one sees his hand or his luck to be great, and his prudence even greater’. John Manningham, writing in his diary on 27 March 1603, recorded his first sighting of the King’s fellow countrymen in London: ‘I saw this afternoon a Scottish Lady at Mr Fleet’s in Lothbury; she was sister to Earl Gowrie.’ And on 16 April Henry Garnet wrote to Robert Persons, giving his impression of recent events:

My very loving sir, Since my last to you of the sixteenth of March, there hath happened a great alteration, by the death of the queen. Great fears were: but all are turned into greatest security; and a golden time we have of unexpected freedom abroad…

Yesternight came letters from [James]; but were not to be opened until this day. Great hope is of toleration; and so general a consent of Catholics in his proclaiming as it seemeth God will work much. All sorts of religions live in hope and suspense; yet the Catholics have great cause to hope for great respect, and that the nobility all almost labour for it, and have good promise thereof from his majesty: so that, if no foreign competitors hinder, the Catholics think themselves well, and would be loath any Catholic princes or his holiness should stir against the peaceable possession of the kingdom.
³

‘If no foreign competitors hinder’: it was astute of Garnet to convey such a warning to Persons. Though James had taken the English Crown with scant protest at home, an adverse response from those still pressing the claims of Spain would throw all into hazard; and if any priest could be said to know Spanish intentions with regard to the throne it was Robert Persons. Garnet urged the case for non-intervention. James was ready for peace with Spain, according to Garnet’s (unnamed) sources. He might even be ready to receive a papal envoy into the realm (something Elizabeth had always refused to do). Garnet could report that his co-religionists were content to believe Spanish interest in England had only been ‘to set up a Catholic king’ on the throne, not to seize it for themselves. Spain—and Persons—would be advised to do nothing to disabuse them of this notion. Indeed, wrote Garnet, his sole remaining worry was the recent talk he had heard of ‘some threats against Jesuits, as unwilling to [acknowledge] his majesty’s title, ready to promote the Spaniard, meddling in matters of state, and authors, especially, of the Book of Succession’. For this reason, he added, he had taken it upon himself to write to James on behalf of the Society, guaranteeing Jesuit loyalty to the new King. If Persons was chastened by this reference to his work on
A Conference about the Next Succession
he did not say. Instead, he contacted the Papal Secretary of State, then the Pope himself, urging that an envoy be sent to England forthwith. To Garnet, meanwhile, he wrote of the ‘great contentment’ with which news of James’s succession had been received in Rome.
⁴

Garnet’s communiqué to James, dated 28 March 1603, just four days after Elizabeth’s death, was forwarded to a nobleman at court. Sadly, the nobleman’s identity is unknown, but evidently he was a man powerful enough to pick his moment with James: Garnet’s instructions were to present the letter only when the time was favourable. In it, Garnet assured James of the Jesuits’ ‘love, fidelity, duty and obedience’. The new King, he wrote, would never have cause to distrust Garnet’s fellowship ‘of poor, weak and disgraced religious men’.
⁵

The new King, himself, was still in transit from Scotland to London. Passage south was slow. Royal protocol required that Elizabeth be buried some four weeks after her death and it would have made poor showing for James’s triumphal arrival to have clashed with his predecessor’s solemn departure. So James drew out his progress, taking time to go hunting and to test the hospitality of his English subjects. This was not found wanting: on 14 April he was ‘bountifully’ entertained by Mrs Jennison of Walworth, near Durham, to his ‘very high contentment’; Mrs Jennison was mother-in-law to John Gerard’s two sisters Mary and Martha.
*
But true to the spirit of tangled reporting at large, other reasons were soon being given for the protracted nature of his journey. Giovanni Carlo Scaramelli, the Venetian ambassador to England, wrote home that James had no desire to be present at the obsequies because he could never ‘expel from his memory the fact that his mother was put to death [by Elizabeth]’.
⁶

At York on Tuesday, 19 April James took the opportunity to reward Thomas Gerard, John’s brother, for his family’s loyalty to Mary Stuart. Witnesses reported that he dubbed Thomas knight with the words: ‘I am particularly bound to love your blood on account of the persecution you have borne for me.’ To John Gerard, the action showed ‘in His Majesty a good consideration of his servants’, though the new knighthood, itself, he thought of little worth: the Gerards, he wrote, ‘had been [knights] for sixteen or seventeen descents’. Still, for Catholics it was a promising sign: the son of their most conspicuous martyr was even now honouring those who had suffered on her behalf. On 25 April Lord Thomas Howard, heir to the disgraced Duke of Norfolk, and Henry Percy, ninth Earl of Northumberland were sworn onto James’s Privy Council at Whitehall. Both men had lost fathers in Mary Stuart’s service, Howard’s to the headsman, Percy’s (as it was rumoured) to an assassin in the Tower. When Howard’s uncle was also admitted to the Council and promoted Earl of Northampton, many took this as a clear indication that James was determined to right his predecessor’s wrongs. Scaramelli wrote back to the Doge in Venice, ‘The King continues to support those houses and persons who were oppressed by the late Queen.’ Most promising of all was the news of the imminent release from the Tower and banishment of the former Jesuit Superior, William Weston, as part of a mass clear-out of captured priests from the various internment camps around the country. It was small wonder that Henry Garnet could write of his great hopes of toleration, that John Gerard could note a host of ‘hopeful signs of future favour’ and that a Mr John Chamberlain, writing to his friend on 12 April, could observe: ‘These bountiful beginnings raise all men’s spirits, and put them in great hopes.’ Hope. To Gerard it was ‘a human help of no small force’ and in those first few heady weeks of James’s reign it bubbled up freely from a great wellspring of Catholic optimism.
⁷