God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests and the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot

In the summer of 1577 Gerard applied for, and received, a licence to travel abroad to study. For the next three years he attended lectures at Dr William Allen’s English College, first at the University of Douai in the Spanish Netherlands, then, when the college was expelled from there, at the University of Reims. Allen, an exiled Oxford academic, had opened the English College as a training school for those English boys still wishing to enter the Catholic priesthood, now that this was forbidden to them in their own country. The college also offered a thorough education to any English student unwilling to swear allegiance to the new Church of England, an oath required of all those graduating from the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. At Reims Gerard first came into contact with a member of the Society of Jesus, an English Jesuit named Lovel, and from Reims he travelled to Cleremont, the school of the French Jesuits near Paris, determined to join the Society himself. He was not yet sixteen.22

The Society of Jesus was a new religious order, founded in 1540 by a Spanish ex-soldier called Ignatius Loyola, with the specific aim of converting the heathen and reconciling the lapsed. Loyola dreamed of countering the rise of Protestantism and restoring the Catholic Church to its former pre-eminence in Europe. To this end he had brought all his army training to bear on the problem in hand: ‘I have never left the army,’ he explained, ‘I have only been seconded to the service of God.’ His Jesuits operated as a tightly knit organization bound by a rigid, even military discipline, and Gerard, who used his time at the college to continue his studies, was quickly impressed by the elite band of priests who taught him. When illness forced him to return to England in the spring of 1583, he spent his convalescence disposing of his property and possessions in preparation for a new life among them.23

His difficulty came in leaving the country for a second time. To leave England without State permission was a crime according to English law. To leave England to train as a Catholic priest was still worse a crime, the effects of which were often felt by the criminal’s family in his absence. Gerard chose to leave the country without a licence. With a party of other Catholics, all heading abroad with intentions similar to his own, he set sail from Gravesend early in November 1583. The weather was against them. After five days at sea, making heavy progress into strong winds, they were forced to put in to Dover. At Dover it was revealed they had a spy in their company when the entire party was arrested by customs officers and sent up to London for questioning. The spy, Thomas Dodwell, reported back to the Privy Council how the group had bribed ‘Raindall, the [officer] of Gravesend, [who] receiveth money of passengers, suffering them to pass without searching.’24

While his companions were imprisoned, the nineteen-year-old Gerard (whose cousin Sir Gilbert Gerard was Master of the Rolls and held some sway with the Government) was taken into custody first by his uncle, George Hastings, brother to the Earl of Huntingdon, then by the Bishop of London. Both men set about encouraging Gerard to convert to the Protestant faith. Both men failed. It was a measure of his strength of will that the teenager held out against the arguments of his two more powerful opponents, with the threat of imprisonment, and worse, hanging over his head. But whatever fear Gerard might have felt, he left the Bishop of London’s palace for prison still protesting his Catholicism.25

John Gerard was committed to the Marshalsea prison in Southwark on 5 March 1584. His year-long imprisonment was spent in the heady company of like-minded rebels against the nationalized Church: laymen and women arrested for their refusal to attend Protestant services and a number of priests awaiting execution. It was an intoxicating education. When at last his friends were able to secure his release from prison, in return for paid guarantees that he would not leave the country, his desire to become a Jesuit burnt fiercer than ever. At the end of May 1586 his chance came. An old friend of his, Anthony Babington, agreed to stand bail for him if he failed to appear before the authorities at the next quarter and John Gerard escaped to France. He was twenty-one.26

From France, Gerard travelled south to Italy, where he entered the English College of Rome, the companion school to Dr William Allen’s successful Reims institution. By now his general eagerness to become a priest had transformed itself into the specific ambition of becoming a priest on the English mission. Pope Sixtus V granted him dispensation to take his holy orders early, some months short of the statutory age. The Society of Jesus agreed to admit him into their ranks as a novice and let him finish his training as he worked. And at last, on 15 August 1588, John Gerard became a Jesuit priest in the company of Edward Oldcorne. He was ready to return home.27

Throughout late August and all of September, as the Armada fleet underwent its grim circumnavigation of the British Isles and rumour ran unchecked through the courts of Europe, Gerard and Oldcorne travelled north towards England, accompanied by two other priests. ‘Passing through Switzerland,’ Gerard wrote, ‘we stayed a night at Basle and decided to see the old Catholic buildings of the town: the Lutherans usually leave them intact but the Calvinists destroy them.’ At Reims, he noted, ‘we passed incognito’: the seminary city was full of spies. In Paris a prisoner in one of the city gaols calling himself Jacques Colerdin learned of their arrival. On 1 October Colerdin was able to scribble a letter to Sir Francis Walsingham in London, telling him that ‘There be 8 Priests over from Rome, whereof John Gerard…will be in England within five days.’ Colerdin, who described himself to the Archbishop of Paris as ‘an English priest and Bachelor in Theology’ in a petition he wrote seeking his release, was a Government informer.* His real name was Gilbert Gifford. He was, indeed, a Catholic priest, but since his arrest as an alleged accomplice in the Babington Plot he had found it prudent to switch sides in the religious conflict.† Now he was well placed to point out his fellow seminarians to the English authorities.28

From Paris, Gerard and Oldcorne continued on to Eu, some miles north of Dieppe, in preparation for crossing the Channel. But here they received unwelcome news from England. ‘The Spanish Fleet’, wrote Gerard, ‘had exasperated the people against the Catholics; everywhere a hunt was being organised for Catholics and their houses searched; in every village and along all the roads and lanes very close watches were kept to catch them.’ Clearly conditions at home were far from ideal for them to attempt a landing in secret and for the next few weeks the pair were forced to kick their heels on the French coast, while their superiors back in Rome decided what should be done. At last a letter came through: ‘we were free’, wrote Gerard, ‘either to go ahead with the enterprise or stay back until things in England had quietened down. This was the answer we desired.’ Immediately, the two men set about finding a ship.29

As John Gerard stood in the shadows of a Norfolk wood choosing the best and safest route to London, he had already committed treason, according to England’s latest laws. The act of 1585 ‘against Jesuits, seminary priests and such other like disobedient persons’, one of nine pieces of parliamentary legislation during Elizabeth’s reign to seek to redefine treachery in the face of a newly perceived menace, employed bully-boy language to make its point. Any Englishman ordained a Catholic priest since June 1559 would, the act threatened, soon find out ‘how dangerous it shall be for them…once to put their foot on land within any of her Majesty’s dominions’. In returning home, in stepping from his ship’s boat onto a Norfolk beach, John Gerard had become a traitor to his country. If caught, he would be punished accordingly. As he left the wood, heading westwards, he was spotted by a group of men walking towards him.* 30

Gerard takes up the story:

‘Walking boldly up to them I asked whether they knew anything about a stray hawk; perhaps they had heard its bell tinkling as it was flying around. I wanted them to believe that I had lost my bird and was wandering about the countryside in search of it [then] they would not be surprised because I was a stranger here and unfamiliar with the lanes and countryside; they would merely think that I had wandered here in my search…They told me they had not seen or heard a falcon recently and they seemed sorry that they could not put me on its track. So with a disappointed look I went off as if I were going to search for it in the trees and hedges round about.’31

This was his strategy for the rest of that day. Each time he saw someone working in the fields he approached them, asking them the same question: had they seen his hawk? His progress was slow. Occasionally he doubled back on his tracks to make his search more convincing. But gradually he moved inland, away from the sea.

‘At the end of the day I was soaked with rain and felt hungry. It had been a rough crossing and I had been able to take practically no food or sleep on board, so I turned for the night into an inn in a village I was passing, thinking that they were less likely to question a man they saw entering an inn.’ Inside, he made enquiries about buying a pony and found the people willing to help him. The following morning, Sunday, 30 October, he set off on horseback towards Norwich, no longer in any danger of being taken for a vagrant, but still at the mercy of the county watches. At the village of Worstead he was apprehended.32

‘They ordered me to dismount, and asked me who I was and where I came from. I told them I was in the service of a certain lord who lived in another county—he did in fact know me well, although these men had not heard of him—and I explained that my falcon had flown away and I had come here to see whether I could recover it.’ But this time the watchers refused to release him, insisting he be brought before the constable and the officer of the watch for further questioning. Gerard submitted and was led to the village church where the two men were attending morning service. Now he was faced with a dilemma. ‘One of the watchers went in [to the church] and came back with the answer that [the officer] wanted me to come inside where he would see me at the end of the service.’ For Gerard it was a sin to enter a Protestant church. So Gerard refused to go in, claiming he was reluctant to leave his horse behind. When the officer at last came out to question him he was clearly angry and suspicious. ‘He asked me first where I came from and I named a number of places which I had learned were not far away. Then he asked me my name, employment, home, the reason for my coming, and I gave him the answers that I had given before. Finally on asking whether I was carrying any letters, I invited him to search me.’ The officer was unimpressed. He declared ‘it was his duty to take me before the Justice of the Peace’, and Gerard prepared himself for immediate arrest. Then suddenly the man relented, with the words, ‘You’ve got the look of an honest fellow. Go on then in God’s name.’ Later, Gerard attributed this stroke of good fortune to providence. Now, he hurriedly set off towards Norwich before the officer could change his mind.33

Furnished by a fellow traveller with the name of a suitable inn on the southernmost outskirts of Norwich, Gerard circled the city walls. He avoided the busy London road, which led into the city through the well-guarded St Stephen’s Gates, and passed instead over common grazing land to Brazen Doors, a smaller set of gates that opened onto All Saints Green. From there it was a short walk to the inn on Market Hill, at the foot of Norwich Castle.34

The inn was busy and Gerard settled himself down to observe. ‘I was there only a short time when in walked a man who seemed well known to the people of the house. He greeted me courteously and then sat down by the fire to warm himself. He began talking about some Catholic gentlemen imprisoned in the city and mentioned by name a man, one of whose relatives had been with me in the Marshalsea Prison…I listened carefully but said nothing.’ When the man left the room, Gerard asked his neighbour who he was. The reply was welcome news to him: ‘He is a very good fellow, except for the fact that he is a Papist.’ The man was out on bail from the city gaol after a decade in prison for his faith and he was, by common consent, ‘a most pig-headed’ Catholic.* 35

‘I kept quiet until the man returned and when the others had gone out I told him that I wanted to have a word with him in some safe place. I had heard he was a Catholic, I said, and was very pleased to hear it because I was one too.’ Briefly, Gerard explained how he came to be in Norwich and asked for the man’s assistance in getting to London. The man knew of no one travelling to the capital that Gerard could join, and so pass as one of their party, but he did know someone in town who might be able to help him and he left the inn to find this contact.36

When he returned to the inn a short while later he asked Gerard to follow him out onto the street and into the thick of the bustling market. While the two men pretended to examine the various goods for sale they were observed from a distance by a third man. Soon he approached the pair and asked them both to come with him. He led the way through the narrow side streets of Norwich towards the city’s cathedral. There, in the cavernous nave of the great church, the man questioned Gerard intently before asking him outright whether he was a priest—in which case, said the man, he would offer him all the help he needed.* Gerard asked his name. Then he admitted he was a Jesuit priest sent from Rome.37

The printers of Amsterdam, as they compiled their annual almanac for 1588, had predicted that late autumn would be lucky for some. So it had proved for John Gerard. The man in whose hands he had just placed his life was Edward Yelverton, one of the richest Catholics in Norfolk. That same evening Yelverton spirited Gerard out of Norwich and by Monday, 31 October the priest had gone to ground at Yelverton’s house at Grimston, 61/2 miles northeast of King’s Lynn. After forty-eight hours at large Gerard had reached a safe haven. His work, though, had only just begun. And with the events of the summer that work had become harder still.38

The Spanish Armada had achieved what no amount of religious reforms and parliamentary legislation over the preceding decades had been able to do. It had united a fractured nation behind its unhappy compromise of a nationalized Church in opposition to the Catholic crusade. It had bound Anglicanism and Englishness together seemingly indissolubly. And it had transformed all those who could not bring themselves to accept this new Church of England into potential traitors, fifth columnists willing, in the rhetoric of a royal proclamation issued that July, ‘to betray their own natural country and most unnaturally to join with foreign enemies in the spoil and destruction of the same’. To be a Catholic in the year 1588 was to be an unnatural Englishman. It was to be worse than that still, as a story told by a fellow Jesuit illustrated. In late August, as many Catholics awaited execution for their alleged treachery, a ‘certain lady went to a man of importance asking him to use his influence that the death of one of the condemned might be delayed. The first question was whether the person whose cause she pleaded was guilty of murder. She replied that he had not been condemned for any such thing, but only for the Catholic religion. “Oh dear,” said the gentleman, “For his religion! If he had committed murder I should not have hesitated to comply with your request; but as it is a question of religion, I dare not interfere.”’ To the English in Armada year, even homicide was less of an evil than Catholicism.39

And Gerard had come to join a covert mission, the first undertaking of which was to ask English Catholics to stand up and be counted, to demonstrate their faith by refusing to attend the Protestant Church, to identify themselves to a Government seeking to eradicate them as traitors. Small wonder then that in an England still reeling from the events of that year, in an England crying out for revenge, this task had acquired Herculean proportions.* 40

Fourteen years earlier, though, for the first young English priests to embark upon this newly begun mission, their venture must have seemed no less a trial of strength. They might have been returning home to their family and friends, but at the same time they were entering an unfamiliar, hostile world: a beleaguered and suspicious England whose savagery had yet to be put to the test. And they were entering that world in secret, in disguise, in the very manner of the political secret agents their homeland believed them to be. Formidable, too, had been the challenge of establishing the mission at the start, of drawing together the dejected exiles from an Oxford University shattered by religious reforms, of schooling them in martyrdom and of dispatching them home in increasing numbers to face unknown perils.

For his ninth task Hercules had only to steal the Amazon Queen’s belt—a gift she herself had been willing to grant him. John Gerard and his fellows were attempting to steal the souls of English men and women back to the Catholic Church, and to do so under the nose of the, perhaps, even more redoubtable English Queen. It was a labour that would come at a high price.

* Regiomontanus’s real name was Johan Muller, from Königsberg, now Kaliningrad, in Lithuania. He supplied Christopher Columbus with astronomical tables on his voyage across the Atlantic.

* At the beginning of 1588 Dr John Harvey was commissioned by the Privy Council to write an academic pamphlet denouncing the accuracy of prophecies in general and Regiomontanus’s in particular.

* Sixtus had said of Elizabeth ‘were she only a Catholic, she would be without her match, and we would esteem her highly’.

* His flagship, the San Martin, reached the Spanish port of Santander on 21 September, with 180 of her crew dead from disease and starvation, another forty killed in battle and the rest so weak the ship had to be towed into dock. Only some seventy ships of the fleet returned.

* In the context of this book the term ‘nationalism’ is not intended to convey any pre-occupation with English ethnic identity; rather, it is intended to convey the growing sense of English sovereignty at this period, in response to the fragmentation of Christendom and England’s loss of its European territories.

* The Duke of Medina Sidonia’s sailing orders to his fleet confirmed that ‘the principal foundation and cause, that have moved the King his Majesty to make and continue this journey, hath been, and is, to serve God; and to return unto his church a great many of contrite souls, that are oppressed by the heretics, enemies to our holy catholic faith’.

† The terms Catholic, Protestant and Anglican should be applied with a certain linguistic caution. Broadly, the word ‘Catholic’ was by now recognized to refer only to those followers of the Roman Church. The word ‘Protestant’ referred initially only to German church reformers, though by the late sixteenth century it had acquired a wider reference and was in use in England to describe followers of the State Church. English Protestantism, though, was a very different animal from its European counterparts. The word ‘Anglican’ seems first to have been used as a derogatory term by King James VI of Scotland in 1598. It was not until much later that it became synonymous with the Church of England and English Protestantism.

* In 1585 Philip II had offered himself to Pope Sixtus V as the sword of the Catholic Church in the fight to reconcile England with Rome. Previously, French Catholics, led by the powerful Guise family, had planned a series of invasions, with the intention of deposing Elizabeth and replacing her with the half-French Mary, Queen of Scots (Mary’s mother was Mary of Guise). Mary was Elizabeth’s de facto heir apparent, although Elizabeth never acknowledged her as such.

† Heretics, as defined by St Thomas (II-II: 11: 1) were those who, having professed the faith of Christ, then proceeded to corrupt it from within. They differed from Infidels who refused to believe in Christ at all, and from Apostates who renounced Christianity for another faith, or no faith altogether. The word heresy derives from the Greek word for choice.

* Every detail of this landing is taken from an account of it written up afterwards by one of the two Jesuits, Father John Gerard.

* The sheriff was the Crown’s chief executive officer in a county, in charge of keeping the peace, dispensing justice, and overseeing local elections.

* He was arrested in a Paris brothel in 1587, though the precise nature of his crime remains unclear. He died in prison in 1590.

† The 1586 Babington Plot was the last in a series of Catholic attempts to assassinate Elizabeth and free Mary, Queen of Scots in advance of a foreign invasion; it led to Mary’s execution. Anthony Babington, Gerard’s friend, appears to have been a man of more devotion than sense and how much the plot was the work of agents provocateurs remains ambiguous. Gilbert Gifford’s role is particularly questionable and most believe he was working for Walsingham from the start. Gerard’s father was also arrested for alleged complicity in the plot. He was released in October 1588.

* The coastal counties had borne the brunt of the nation’s anxiety during the Armada conflict. Close watches had been kept throughout the summer months for spies, Spanish ships, and anything suspicious; now those same coastal watches were kept busy patrolling the countryside looking for vagabonds. The vagabonds in question were disbanded sailors and militiamen, laid off without their promised pay and in search of food and work. Since the Armada, an order had been issued that any vagabond ‘found with any manifest offence tending to stir troubles or rebellion…[was]…to be executed by martial law’.

* The ‘pig-headed’ Catholic gentleman was almost certainly the Norfolk landowner Robert Downes, whose Melton estate lay just a mile west of Norwich. He was arrested in 1578 for his refusal to attend the Protestant Church. He lost his estates in Suffolk and Essex and in 1602 he surrendered most of his life interest in Melton to the Queen. He was still in Norwich gaol in 1598. He died in 1610.

* Catholics believed that though they could not enter a Protestant church where divine services were held, the nave of a cathedral was part of the general precincts of the building and therefore not sacrosanct.

* One eyewitness wrote of the vengeance taken against English Catholics following the Armada’s defeat: ‘When the danger of the war at sea was over, and the army conscripted upon land dispersed, our rulers turned their weapons from the foe abroad and plunged them into the bowels of their own nation. The hatred stored up against the Spaniards they are wreaking with a sort of bestial fury upon their own fellow citizens and subjects.’

Two

‘If God himself on earth abode would make

He Oxford sure would for his dwelling take.’

(Sixteenth century)

ON 10 DECEMBER 1566, eight years into the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and twenty years prior to John Gerard’s secret Norfolk landing, Magdalen College acquired a new tenant for its property at 3 Castle Street, standing in the shadow of Oxford Castle. The tenant’s name was Walter Owen. He was a twenty-six-year-old carpenter with a wife and young family. In time, all four sons from this family would join the mission to save English Catholicism. Two would die for it. One, in death, would hold in his hands the life of almost every Catholic involved in it. His name was Nicholas Owen.1

Few facts are known about Nicholas Owen’s childhood: an approximate date of birth (some time between 1561 and 1564), a joinery apprenticeship (in February 1577) to Oxford’s William Conway, and the location of the Owen family’s house on Castle Street—little more. Across the road from this six-room, two-storey tenement stood the twelfth century parish church of St Peter-le-Bailey, a ‘very old little church and odd’. Four doors to the left of the house was 7 Castle Street, called Billing Hall or the Redcock. Here, in 1298, it was said a clerk had caused the Devil to appear. A few yards to the right of the house were the butchers’ shambles, a row of shops in the middle of the newly paved Great Bailey Street. Here, the blood and offal spilt from the freshly killed carcasses coursed over the gravel and into the drainage channel running down the centre of the road. Heaven, hell and the stench of blood: Nicholas Owen was raised within the axis of all three.2