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

Further still to the left, high up on the hill, stood the tall tensided keep of Oxford Castle, its walls as thick as a man was tall. Within that keep there stood another, its walls only slightly less thick, and inside that there was the well chamber, with a well shaft so deep you could not fathom the bottom of it. Walls within walls, chambers within chambers: Oxford Castle would provide plenty of inspiration for Nicholas Owen in his later life. Beyond the keep there lay the castle gaol and next to the castle gaol there stood the gallows.3

The castle was in a ruinous state by the time of Owen’s birth: the seat of Oxford’s civic power had long ago shifted to the city’s Council Chambers. But beyond the parish of St Peter-le-Bailey, to its west, lay evidence of a more recent power-shift still. Here were the remains of Oseney Abbey, lately Oxford’s cathedral. All that was left of it were the church walls, the dovecote and the outbuildings; the rest of the stone had been stripped from the site and carried over to the construction works at Christ Church College. Further to the south a similar process was at work as the Franciscan and Dominican friaries were dismantled piece by piece by city speculators and sold off to make new townhouses.4

The landscape of England was being re-drawn. The castles and manor houses of the old feudal aristocracy had shared their domination of the English countryside with the spires and steeples of the abbeys, priories and monasteries. They had stamped their authority on the public consciousness by the sheer scale of their physical presence. But both aristocrats and abbots had found themselves systematically stripped of that authority in Tudor England. And all those who had bowed to the seigniority of Nobility and Church, who had prospered under it or were sheltered by it, were left shivering in the brisk winds of change.

This was the birth of modern England, with a newly re-worked relationship between Parliament and monarch, and an increasing dependence on the unstoppable middle classes. Of course for some it had been an entirely unwanted pregnancy, but for many, many more across the nation, some with, some without a vested interest in the old order, but all of them sharing a strong desire for stability and the certainty of tradition, it would prove a difficult birth: bloody and unutterably painful. And nowhere was this truer than at Oxford.

On 3 February 1530, just over thirty years before Nicholas Owen was born, William Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury, peremptorily thrust Oxford University into the centre of the controversy of the hour. He wrote to the Vice-Chancellor asking him and Oxford’s academics to provide a unanimous opinion on the validity of the marriage of Henry VIII to Catherine of Aragon.5

The request was as untactful as it was unwelcome: Cardinal Wolsey, the university’s wealthiest patron, had been arrested only the year before for failing to provide Henry with the verdict he was looking for. And now it must have seemed to those at Oxford, asked to enter after Wolsey into this most explosive of minefields, that the Cardinal’s downfall would soon be followed by their own. So Oxford dragged its heels. When Cambridge, to the same request, came quickly back with the answer Henry wanted, the relief in the fens might have been palpable but the spotlight now shone ever more brightly on the midlands. And still Oxford dragged its heels.6

In early April the King could wait no longer. His agents, led by the Bishop of Lincoln, descended on the university, hotly pursued by a strongly worded letter from Henry himself. While the bishop worked on Convocation, persuading them to hand the matter over to the university’s theologians, Henry reminded the ‘youth’ of Oxford precisely where their loyalties lay. This two-pronged attack produced the desired result. Though the Faculty of Arts grumbled that the Faculty of Theology had no right to speak for the university as a whole, the combination of manipulation and not so veiled threat had won the day. On 8 April Oxford University gave Henry the answer he was looking for: his marriage was invalid. But its tardiness in doing so was neither forgiven nor forgotten.* 7

In September 1535 Henry’s agents were back in Oxford as part of a whirlwind tour of the country in preparation for the dissolution of the monasteries and by now the bloodshed had begun. In July of that year one of Oxford’s most illustrious former scholars, Sir Thomas More, was executed on Tower Hill, a victim of the new Treason Act: a piece of legislation that efficiently turned loyalty to the Pope in Rome into treachery to the English State. More’s scruples did not trouble Henry’s agents, though: Dr Richard Layton, ‘a cleric of salacious tastes’, and his assistant, John Tregwell, brought with them to Oxford an estate agent’s eye for a property and a prospector’s nose for gold, neatly masked behind an official mandate to root out opposition to the King’s new church. Their report, when it came, hit the university a sickening blow.8

The first wave of the dissolution saw all of Oxford’s religious houses shut down: the Benedictine-run Canterbury, Durham and Gloucester Colleges, and the Cistercian-run St Bernard’s College. Their assets were stripped, their real estate sold off to the highest bidder and their inhabitants turned out onto the streets. Scores of academics and undergraduates now found themselves jobless, homeless and penniless. Hard hit too were the university libraries. College after college was ransacked for its illuminated books (seen as symbols of a despised papist idolatry), which were then carried out in cartloads and destroyed. In New College quadrangle the pages of the scattered medieval manuscripts blew thick as the autumn leaves, reported Layton. One enterprising student, a Master Greenefeld from Buckinghamshire, gathered them up and used them to make ‘Sewells or Blanshers [game-scarers] to keep the Deer within the wood, and thereby to have better cry with his hounds.’9

Oxford reeled under this attack. The developing university had drawn the wealth of the monasteries to the city. Those same monasteries had spawned the abbeys and priories, and they, in turn, had financed the building of Oxford’s first academic halls. And so the university and the city had grown. Even the newer, secular colleges, which escaped the cull but were bludgeoned into a show of loyalty, were dependent on the Church revenue now being siphoned into the Crown’s coffers. The destruction of the monasteries brought academic chaos to Oxford. More pertinently, it also brought festering resentment.10

Some fourteen years later, in 1549, royal agents called on Oxford again. This time they were Edward VI’s visitors, come to enforce his new Prayer Book, the first real doctrinal step towards Protestantism.* Hot on their heels came the German and Swiss mercenary forces of Lord Grey of Wilton. Let Oxford be in no doubt that this regime meant business. Of the thirteen heads of those Oxford colleges still remaining, the visitors could find only two who supported the Government’s religious policy; as the Protestant reformer, Peter Martyr, remarked: ‘the Oxford men…are still pertinaciously sticking in the mud of popery’. But events soon proved that Oxford men were not the only stick-in-the-muds. July of that year burnt with the heat of a countrywide rebellion. On 12 July the Duke of Somerset wrote to Lord Russell, to lament the ‘stir here in Bucks. and Oxfordshire by instigation of sundry priests (keep it to yourself)’. Lord Russell scarcely had time to broadcast the news; just six days later Grey’s mercenaries had quickly and ruthlessly put out the fires. The eleven-year-old King Edward noted gleefully in his journal that Lord Grey ‘did so abash the rebels, that more than half of them ran their ways, and other [sic] that tarried were some slain, some taken and some hanged’. Grey left careful instruction that ‘after execution done the heads of every of them…to be set up in the highest place for the more terror of the said evil people’. The vicars of Chipping Norton and of Bloxham were hanged from the steeples of their own churches, and Johann Ulmer, a Swiss medical student at Christ Church College, wrote home to his patron, the Zurich reformer Heinrich Bullinger, that ‘the Oxfordshire papists are at last reduced to order, many of them having been apprehended, and some gibbeted, and their heads fastened to the walls’.11

The purges soon followed. Magdalen College lost its president, Dr Owen Oglethorpe, forced out in favour of a suitable Protestant candidate. Christ Church lost John Clement, a former tutor in the household of Sir Thomas More, who now fled to the university at Louvain in the Spanish Netherlands to join the growing community of Oxford disaffected there. Corpus Christi lost its dean and its president, both arrested and carried off to London, one to the Marshalsea prison for seditious preaching, the other to the Fleet prison for using the old form of service on the preceding Corpus Christi day. These were not the only expulsions and Oxford braced itself for a stormy future.12

And then the weather turned. On 6 July 1553 Edward died, and the chill winds of reform swung southerly, blowing before them, back from the Continent, the exiles of Oxford: Oglethorpe back to Magdalen, Clement back to practise medicine in Essex. They passed on the dockside a new generation of Oxford men, John Jewel of Corpus Christi, Christopher Goodman, the Lady Margaret Professor, off into exile in their turn, as Queen Mary immediately rescinded her brother’s statutes. The next five years brought calm to a city that basked in the warmth of the sovereign’s personal favour. They also brought prosperity. Mary tripled the university’s revenue and oversaw the foundation of two new colleges, Trinity and St John’s, in place of the ruined Durham and St Bernard’s.13

At Corpus Christi the ornaments and vestments hidden from sight during Edward’s reign were triumphantly returned to the college chapel. Communion tables were quickly removed and replaced with new altars; the ‘6 psalms in English’, the ‘great Bible’ and the ‘book of Communion’—all of which had been demanded by Edward’s visitors—were destroyed; and, all around Oxford, people picked up the pieces of lives rudely shattered by statute from London. When ex-Bishops Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley, and the former Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer, were sent to Oxford for trial, it was signal proof that Mary never doubted the city’s loyalty. That the Government wished to demonstrate in an academic setting the shortcomings of doctrinal heresy and that all the accused were from Cambridge merely underlined the wisdom of the decision. When the three men were burnt in a ditch opposite Balliol College it had little impact on the watching crowd—Latimer’s ‘candle’ of martyrdom found a marked lack of oxygen in Oxford.14

Mary was swept into power on a wave of popular support, but she found herself left high and dry on virgin sand as England’s first queen regnant since Matilda’s ill-fated attempt to assert her claim to her father, Henry I’s throne. Matilda had plunged the nation into a nineteen-year civil war; throughout the last bitter summer of Mary’s reign Englishmen can have felt only relief that they had got away so lightly this time around. Still, the previous five years had brought more than their fair share of misery. On her accession Mary had commanded her ‘loving Subjects, to live together in quiet Sort, and Christian Charity, leaving those new found devilish Terms of Papist or Heretic’. Her first Parliament had seemed to speak for the majority of her people. Then had come marriage to the reviled King Philip of Spain, the burning of Protestants and a disastrous war with France, and now those same people, the stench of the execution pyres fresh in their nostrils, awaited her death with impatience. On 17 November 1558 it finally came and ‘all the churches in London did ring and at night [the people] did make bonfires and set tables in the street and did eat and drink and make merry for the new Queen’, wrote Machyn in his diary. At just twenty-five years old, though, that new young queen, Elizabeth, was very much an unknown quantity. While London celebrated, Oxford held its breath and waited for what the royal visitors would bring.15

On Christmas Day 1558, just weeks into the new reign, Dr Owen Oglethorpe of Magdalen, now Bishop of Carlisle and the officiating divine for the festivities, received a message from Queen Elizabeth asking him not to elevate the consecrated host at High Mass that day. The Spanish ambassador, Count de Feria, reported Oglethorpe’s refusal to comply with the request: ‘Her Majesty was mistress of his body and life, but not of his conscience’. Elizabeth heard mass that day until the gospel had been read and then, as Oglethorpe prepared to celebrate the transformation of bread to body and wine to blood, she rose and left the royal chapel. To those who watched and waited this was the first public indication of which way the Queen might jump.16

If Elizabeth herself had wanted a sign of how the battle lines were forming she need not have looked far. Mary’s death had brought with it a flurry of bag packing in Geneva, Zurich, Strasbourg and Frankfurt, the centres of Protestantism, as the exiles from the previous reign prepared to return home. After all, Elizabeth, like her brother Edward, had been educated from childhood in the new religion. Meanwhile, the opposing camp was quick to make its objections felt. At Mary’s funeral the Bishop of Winchester praised the dead monarch as a good and loyal daughter of the true Church, referring to Elizabeth, throughout, as ‘the other sister’. He laid down his challenge to the new Queen, a challenge peculiar to her sex, in the bluntest of terms: ‘How can I, a woman, be head of the church, who, by Scripture, am forbidden to speak in church, except the church shall have a dumb head?’ At Elizabeth’s coronation the Archbishop of York refused to officiate and only Owen Oglethorpe could be persuaded to perform the ceremony. And in France King Henri II, who had ordered that the arms of England should be quartered with those of Scotland upon the marriage of Mary Stuart to the Dauphin, now encouraged his son and daughter-in-law to style themselves King and Queen of England.17

Was Elizabeth’s choice of religion ever really in doubt then? She was the daughter of the ‘concubine Anne Boleyn’, the woman for whom Henry VIII had broken with Rome in the first place. Her parents’ marriage had never been recognized by the Catholic Church and her own legitimacy of birth had long been a subject for parliamentary enactment. Just days before her mother’s execution Thomas Cranmer had annulled her parents’ marriage and Elizabeth, at a stroke, was both bastardized and disinherited. Her present claim to the throne rested on her father’s will and the Succession Act of 1543, which reinstated her as Henry’s heir, and the French, in particular, were quick to cast doubts on Parliament’s right to tamper with these sacred laws of inheritance—by Christmas 1558 they ‘did not let to say and talk openly that Her Highness is not lawful Queen of England and that they have already sent to Rome to disprove her right’, wrote Lord Cobham, Elizabeth’s envoy in Paris.18

The French had indeed sent to Rome. By the New Year Sir Edward Carne was reporting back from the Holy City that ‘the ambassador of the French laboreth the Pope to declare the Queen illegitimate and the Scottish Queen successor to Queen Mary’. That the French chose to object to Elizabeth’s claim out of political self-interest rather than religious scruple was not in question: they had raised similar doubts about the legitimacy of Elizabeth’s sister Mary when Henry VIII tried to engineer an overly advantageous marriage treaty between her and the Duc d’Orléans. But their challenge to her title underlined Elizabeth’s quandary. If she wished to retain papal supremacy in England she would need to throw herself on the mercy of the Pope. Paul IV had intimated that he was quite ready to consider her claim to her title, but could she really stomach the indignity of going cap in hand to Rome, begging to be excused her bastardy? And could she afford to begin her reign from a position of such weakness? Surely England’s throne was her birthright and no Pope could grant her dispensation to wear the crown? So ‘the wolves of Geneva’ packing to return home to England knew from the start that the odds on Elizabeth seeking a national religion, independent of Rome, were short enough for them to stake their lives on. Now they came back in readiness for that outcome.19

They did not have long to wait. On 8 May 1559 Elizabeth dissolved the first Parliament of her reign, giving royal assent to those acts from which her new Church would take its shape: the Act of Supremacy, which settled on Elizabeth the title of Supreme Governor of that Church, and the Act of Uniformity, which agreed the doctrine it should follow.

The reactions followed swiftly. ‘A leaden mediocrity,’ wrote the newly returned Protestant, John Jewel. ‘The Papacy was never abolished…but rather transferred to the sovereign,’ wrote Theodore Béza in Geneva to Heinrich Bullinger in Zurich. From the first, Elizabeth’s was a Protestant settlement that failed to please the Protestants. But neither did it please the Catholics. ‘Religion here now is simply a question of policy’, wrote the Bishop of Aquila from London, ‘and in a hundred thousand ways they let us see that they neither love us nor fear us.’ John Jewel expressed his surprise that ‘the ranks of the papists have fallen almost of their own accord’, and Count de Feria wrote sadly home to Spain to explain why: ‘The Catholics are in a great majority in the country, and if the leading men in it were not of so small account things would have turned out differently.’* And in London a zealous mob went on the rampage, stripping the capital’s churches of their statues and stained-glass windows ‘as if it had been the sacking of some hostile city’.20

From the start Elizabeth’s religious settlement was a compromise. Like all compromises it failed to satisfy anyone and like all compromises it would be subjected to stresses and strains as each dissatisfied party tried, in turn, to wrest back the advantage. But it is the fact that there was need for a compromise that is of significance to this story, because it suggests a country divided into pressure groups of equal fighting weight.

The religious changes of the English Reformation, so decisive and so devastating for a select few in key positions of authority, had filtered slowly through the rest of the country, dependent upon the efficiency and willingness of those officers charged with their enforcement. By 1558 England’s religious spectrum was a kaleidoscope of colours ranging all the way from the most Roman of purples to Puritan grey. It is impossible to estimate the precise number of confirmed Catholics and Protestants, together with the number of relative indifferents, in England at Elizabeth’s succession. It is equally impossible to arrive at a precise and consistent definition for English Catholicism or English Protestantism at this time: these were not hermetic terms upon which everyone could agree and with which everyone could identify. Indeed it is unlikely that everyone could have told you what they were, Catholic or Protestant, if questioned. It is highly probable that in reaching a compromise settlement the Government paid close attention to the predictable response of the powerful and predatory Catholic nations of Europe. But it is certain that such a compromise would not have been necessary had England not been divided, top to bottom, on this matter of religion. The England Elizabeth inherited was definitely not a Protestant country.

For every Londoner in the largely pro-Protestant capital who went on a spree of vandalism, there was someone else in the shires and villages quietly secreting away the statues, crucifixes and church plate for happier times. For anyone in the south of England—and close to the seat of government—prepared to toe the party line if it led to promotion, there was someone else in the north of the country and far from influence, stubbornly doing as he pleased. For anyone whose heart belonged to Geneva and who felt they had been betrayed by the Queen, there was another whose heart belonged to Rome, who was smarting just as badly. And for Elizabeth, whose heart belonged firmly to England, the challenge lay in holding these two opposing forces in their precarious balance long enough to allow civil divisions to heal over and to effect the urgently needed overhaul of the country’s economy and the repair of its diplomatic relations with the rest of Europe. Because the twenty-five-year-old Queen can have been in little doubt that, as far as Europe was concerned, she and England were in for a turbulent future.

And for the ordinary man and woman in the street, the challenge lay in working out precisely what was required of them by this latest change to the national religion.

On the face of it these requirements were simple. The new Act of Uniformity demanded each subject’s presence at their parish church every Sunday and holy day. Failure to do so, without reasonable excuse, would result in a twelve pence fine for each offence, or the ‘censure of the church’ and possible excommunication, with the consequent loss of civil rights.

Going to church on a Sunday had long been a tradition inspired by faith but enforced by the ecclesiastical courts and over the centuries the machinery of that enforcement had become powerfully efficient: the long arm of the Church’s law reached the full length and breadth of England. It was this machinery, in place, fully operational and re-greased with parliamentary drive in place of holy oil, that Elizabeth’s ministers now used to unseat the religion that had devised it: the Catholic Church in England was hoist with its own petard.

There were other requirements too. Subjects were not to speak in a derogatory fashion about the new Prayer Book, nor to cause a clergyman to use any other form of weekly liturgy than the one specified by the Queen’s officers. The penalties for this were fines of 100, then 400 marks, and, thereafter, life imprisonment. And they were not to be caught defending the papal supremacy; not unless they were prepared to forfeit first their goods, then their liberty, then their life.

But so long as they kept their weekly appointment at the Queen’s new Church and their mouths tightly shut, there was nothing to stop them benefiting from Elizabeth’s lenient attitude towards Catholicism. And this was lenience rather than a move towards outright religious tolerance—a lenience born of political realism. There was no question that Elizabeth wanted to eliminate the Catholic Church in England. There were few, if any, sixteenth century monarchs who could afford to tolerate so strong a rival within their own dominions and Elizabeth’s crown was more vulnerable than most. But realistically this was not going to happen overnight. So the Oath of Supremacy was tendered to all office holders. Anyone who could not swear ‘that the queen is the only supreme governor of this realm…as well in all spiritual or ecclesiastical things…as temporal’ was evicted from that office and denied any further position in the new administration, but elsewhere Elizabeth’s behaviour remained conciliatory.21

Deleted from the new Prayer Book was the offensive Edwardian reference to ‘the tyranny of the Bishop of Rome’. The new Communion service became a careful amalgam of phrases from successive earlier prayer books. It was a mouthful to say—‘The body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul into everlasting life: and take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on him in thine heart by faith, with thanksgiving’—but it remained sufficiently ambiguous to satisfy both those who believed in the real presence in the sacrament and those who denied it. Churchgoers seeking the Virgin Mary were offered a newer and more vital virgin to adore: ‘they keep the birthday of queen Elizabeth in the most solemn way on the 7th day of September, which is the eve of the feast of the Mother of God’, wrote the Catholic Edward Rishton. And although the churches were stripped of their decoration, they still hung on to ‘the organs, the ecclesiastical chants, the crucifix, copes, [and] candles’. Rishton observed: ‘The queen retained many of the ancient customs and ceremonies…partly for the honour and illustration of this new church, and partly for the sake of persuading her own subjects and foreigners into the belief that she was not far…from the Catholic faith.’ It convinced the French ambassador. He wrote home, duly impressed, that the English ‘were in religion very nigh to them’. And, Rishton added, ‘the Queen and her ministers considered themselves most fortunate in that those who clung to…[Catholicism]…publicly accepted, or by their presence outwardly sanctioned, in some way, the new rites they had prescribed. They did not care so much about the inward belief of these men.’ No one, it seemed, was keen to start opening windows into men’s souls at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign.22