Читать книгу God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests and the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot - Alice Hogge - Страница 6

‘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

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

And if the new Anglican Church was built upon the bedrock of compromise, then many who attended it did so in the same spirit. When, in the summer of 1562, a number of prominent Catholics approached the Spanish ambassador, and through him Rome, to ask if they might worship in the Queen’s new Church, the answer they received (in the negative) was not considered absolute enough to act upon, so worship there they did. When many local priests became aware of the level of Catholic feeling in their parishes they made adjustments accordingly; so Catholics might have ‘Mass said secretly in their own houses by those very priests who in church publicly celebrated the [Protestant] liturgy’. To compromise made sound political sense.²³

But could it ever make spiritual sense? The notorious sixteenth century Cambridge academic, Dr Andrew Perne of Peterhouse, ‘was known to have changed his religion three or four times to suit the change of ruler’, but when Perne was asked by a close friend ‘to tell her honestly and simply which was the holy religion that would see her safe to heaven’, he replied, ‘I beg you never to tell anyone what I am going to say…If you wish, you can live in the religion which the Queen and the whole kingdom profess—you will have a good life, you will have none of the vexations which Catholics have to suffer. But don’t die in it. Die in faith and communion with the Catholic Church, that is, if you want to save your soul.’ Perne never had the chance to heed his own advice: he died suddenly, on the way back to his room after dining with the Archbishop of Canterbury, caught out not only in the wrong faith, but also in the headquarters of that faith, Lambeth Palace itself. But this was the dilemma facing all Englishmen now: how did you square your political survival with your spiritual salvation, if, like vast numbers of your fellow countrymen, you still regarded yourself as Catholic? Happy were those whose conscience and the law agreed. For those others, the future, both in this world and the next, looked much more uncertain.²⁴

In November 1561, three years into Elizabeth’s reign, the mayor of Oxford had the unpleasant task of informing the Privy Council that ‘there were not three houses in [Oxford] that were not filled with papists’. And, added the new Spanish ambassador, Bishop Alvaro de la Quadra, in his regular gossip-filled letter to the Duchess of Parma, ‘the Council were far from pleased, and told the Mayor to take care not to say such a thing elsewhere’. But to those with any knowledge of the city’s past, this level of defiance will have come as no surprise: Oxford was running true to form. Deep in the cellars below the Mitre Inn on the High Street, at the Swan Inn, the Star Inn and the Catherine Wheel, Oxford’s Catholics were meeting in secret and in droves to celebrate their forbidden mass.* ²⁵

If the city of Oxford was reluctant to embrace the new Church, then its university was proving even more mutinous. In May 1559 the Swiss Protestant Heinrich Bullinger was confidentially advised against sending his son to college at Oxford, for ‘it is as yet a den of thieves, and of those who hate the light’. That same month John Jewel, now Bishop of Salisbury, was noting with some frustration that ‘our universities are in a most lamentable condition: there are not above two in Oxford of our sentiments’. And when Elizabeth’s visitors arrived at the university that year to enforce the new religious settlement, they were daunted by the strength of Catholic opposition they encountered.²⁶

At New College they avoided asking everyone to subscribe to the Oaths of Supremacy and Uniformity for fear of the number of refusals, reported Nicholas Sanders, a fellow of that college. The Bishop of Winchester, the visitor responsible for New College, found similar hostility at his other wards, Trinity, Corpus Christi and Magdalen. Here, too, he declined to look closely. Instead, he and his fellow visitors concentrated their attention on what they saw as the root of the problem: the men in charge. Within two years only one of Oxford’s college heads appointed during the previous reign remained in office and with that the Council seemed to be content. Let these new replacements keep their house in order and play the heavy hand. That the sole surviving college to retain its Marian head, New College, was the scene of widespread, Council-led purges throughout the first decade of the reign merely seemed to support the wisdom of the Government’s policy.²⁷

Then fate stepped in to send the precarious balance of European power reeling. In July 1559 an unlucky tilt at a French court tournament left King Henri II dead, his fifteen-year-old heir, François, in the sway of his zealous cousins the Guises, and his teenage daughter-in-law, Mary Stuart, sufficiently emboldened to have herself heralded with cries of ‘Make way for the Queen of England!’ A nettled Elizabeth was soon persuaded by her Council to send money to help the Protestant, anti-French rebellion in Scotland and quickly the situation spiralled into open confrontation.²⁸

In early 1560, mindful of the need to present a strong show of national unity in times of danger and fearful that the conflict had fallen far too neatly into battle lines of an awkwardly religious nature, Elizabeth sent her visitors back to Oxford. Soon Bishop de la Quadra was reporting home that ‘Oxford students…[known to be Catholic]…have been taken…[and imprisoned]…in great numbers’. Was this how it was going to be from now on? Each time an enemy threatened was any Englishman not seen to be standing foursquare behind the Queen’s new church and openly obeying her laws liable to arrest and imprisonment? The detention of six Oxford students the following year, for resisting the mayor’s attempts to remove their college crucifix, seemed to confirm this. As Elizabeth braced herself for the return home to Scotland of the newly widowed Mary, it was more the openness of the students’ defiance that earned them their prison sentence: after all, the ultra-conservative Elizabeth still kept a crucifix in her own royal chapel.²⁹

A pattern was being established, a pattern that those English Catholics arrested for attending mass at the French embassy in February 1560, even as the situation in Scotland worsened, might have been able to spot for themselves. The rationale behind it was simple. Had England’s fortunes been entirely separate from those of Europe then Elizabeth and her government could have been content to settle back and let the dismantling of the English Catholic Church be a gradual one, sure in the knowledge that in time the majority of their countrymen would come round to their way of thinking. But England was as entangled with the rest of Europe as religion ever was with politics.* It was a part of the Christian Church, the Church that had bound Europe together. That Church was now divided into factions and while Europe was still known as Christendom, England, like it or not, was integral to that factional struggle. And it was vital to Europe’s equilibrium: its fragile diplomatic alliances with France and Spain in turn keeping either of those two nations from ever singly dominating the European stage—a necessity for Europe, but a constant irritation to successive generations of ambitious French and Spanish monarchs.³⁰

With this the case, conflict was inevitable. For though Elizabeth might have no stomach for religious persecution, still she needed to keep her throne safe from predatory interlopers from across the narrow English Channel. And though England’s Catholics might be loyal to England, still they began to find themselves the focus of increasing and unwelcome Government-imposed restrictions every time affairs in mainland Europe took a turn for the worse.

But if this was a pattern that would emerge more clearly as Elizabeth’s reign progressed, then Oxford’s particular place within that pattern was predictable from the start. And from the start Elizabeth tried to forestall it.

On Saturday, 31 August 1566, ‘about 5 or 6 of the clock at night’, Queen Elizabeth I rode into Oxford. Her wooing of the city, and its university, had begun.³¹

At the head of the royal procession were the Queen’s heralds. Behind them came the Earl of Leicester, in his official role as Chancellor of the university, then the Mayor of Oxford and his party of aldermen, the noblemen of the court, and finally Elizabeth herself. Her

‘chariot was open on all sides, and on a gilded seat in the height of regal magnificence reposed the Queen. Her head-dress was a marvel of woven gold, and glittered with pearls and other wonderful gems; her gown was of the most brilliant scarlet silk woven with gold, partly concealed by a purple cloak lined with ermine after the manner of a triumphal robe. Beside the chariot rode the royal cursitors, resplendent in coats of cloth of gold, and the marshals, who were kept busy preventing the crowds from pressing too near to the person of the Queen…The royal guard, magnificent in gold and scarlet, brought up the rear. Of these there were about two hundred…and on their shoulders they bore…iron clubs like battle-axes.’

Through the north gate they streamed. Down Northgate Street (now Cornmarket), where the scholars who lined the road sank awe-struck to their knees and called out Vivat Regina Elizabetha, hearing their cry taken up by the townspeople leaning from the windows and crammed precariously together on the roof-tops above them. To Carfax, where Giles Lawrence, Oxford’s Regius Professor, welcomed the Queen with an oration in Greek to which Elizabeth responded warmly in the same tongue, thanking Lawrence for his speech and praising it as the best she had heard in that language, adding coyly ‘we would answer you presently, but with this great company we are somewhat abashed’. Lawrence was transfixed.

On down Fish Street (St Aldates) the procession flowed, to Christ Church College, where the gate and walls were festooned with verses in Latin and Greek in admiration of Elizabeth and where, beneath a canopy borne by four Doctors of the university, the Queen was ushered slowly across the quadrangle into the cool and calm of the great cathedral. Here Elizabeth knelt in prayer as Dr Godwin, Christ Church’s Dean, gave thanks for her safe arrival in the city. To the sound of cornets the choir sang the Te Deum and then wearily Elizabeth slipped away through the gardens in the lengthening dusk, to her lodgings in the east wing, to prepare for this, her latest charm offensive.

It was the Queen’s first visit to Oxford. An earlier attempt two years before had been called off at the last moment when plague broke out in the city. But this delay merely ensured that by the time Elizabeth made her dramatic appearance at the north gate anticipation had grown to fever pitch. It also meant that those charged with arranging the visit had left little to chance.

On the Wednesday before the Queen’s arrival the Earl of Leicester and Sir William Cecil had ridden the eight miles from the Palace of Woodstock to Oxford, through the sluicing rain of a late summer downpour, to check for themselves that everything was in order. Leicester, as Oxford’s Chancellor, was host for the week and with his ambition to marry the Queen still intact at this date—just five years earlier, with his brother-in-law acting as go-between, he had approached the Spanish ambassador and offered to return England to the Catholic Church if Spain backed their wedding, a far cry from his later reincarnation as the scourge of English Catholicism—there was more at stake for him here than mere proprietorial embarrassment should Oxford’s hospitality fail to please the Queen. But for Sir William Cecil, Elizabeth’s Principal Secretary of State and her chief adviser on all policies relating to Church and foreign affairs, Oxford’s performance was a matter for greater concern still.³²

Each day of the royal visit Elizabeth and her entourage would attend debates and disputations, the art of which formed the basis of every student’s education. On the Tuesday a rising young Oxford star, Edmund Campion of St John’s College, would triumph in the Natural Philosophy Disputation, proposing ‘that the tides are caused by the moon’s motion’. Elizabeth, who in later life would be revered as the moon goddess, Cynthia, the ‘wide ocean’s empress’, was delighted with Campion’s speech; Cecil and Leicester immediately offered to become his patrons.* But it was indicative of the Government’s continued anxiety over the problem of Oxford’s religious insubordination that Cecil had provided the students in advance with a list of preferred subjects for these debates. Thursday’s Divinity Disputation took as its Council-chosen theme ‘Whether subjects may fight against wicked princes?’, allowing little scope for awkward theological reasoning.† It would have been a brave—and short-lived—undergraduate who dared to denounce Elizabeth’s break with Rome as wicked to her face; more embarrassing and more damaging still to the royal party would have been a spirited and unopposed defence of the Catholic faith. Oxford’s young students were to be given little opportunity to air their religious grievances.³³

But Elizabeth favoured the carrot over the stick whenever possible. In addition she held a deep and unshakeable regard for learning and was determined to see Oxford back in the vanguard of European scholarship after so many decades in the wilderness of religious upheaval.* She had a captive audience of some seventeen hundred students—all of whom had elected to remain at the university despite the term being officially over—and if any queen knew how to entrance an audience it was Elizabeth.³⁴

So Edmund Campion won his court patronage. George Coriat won half a sovereign. Tobie Matthew of Christ Church won the coveted title of Queen’s Scholar, which led to a lifetime of royal preferment and his eventual appointment as Archbishop of York. And all of them won the lavish praise and attention of a queen acutely conscious that her visit needed to serve as a fast-acting panacea for the ills afflicting Oxford. There was banqueting each evening and boisterous theatre in Christ Church’s Great Hall, transformed for the occasion into a gleaming, golden ‘Roman palace’. And then there was Elizabeth’s own speech, given at the church of St Mary the Virgin before the entire university on the final evening of her stay—a speech delivered in faultless, eloquent Latin, a speech in honour of Oxford and of academia, a speech that was welcomed and applauded with unqualified enthusiasm.

As Elizabeth rode out of Oxford the following day, surrounded once again by her glittering procession and by a city liberally hung with verses expressing grief at her departure, she had done much to heal the old wounds left by her father and her brother’s brutal and bullish enforcement of religious change. Her leave-taking was as sincere as it was warm: ‘Farewell, the worthy University of Oxford; farewell, my good subjects there; farewell, my dear Scholars, and pray God prosper your studies.’ Few could have done better under the circumstances. The only problem was it had all taken place several years too late.

Five years before Elizabeth’s visit a twenty-nine-year-old Lancastrian, a one-time student of Oriel College and former principal of St Mary’s Hall, had left Oxford for Flanders and the Low Countries. There, he was a welcome addition to the exiles of Louvain. And there, just seven years later, at the university town of Douai in the province of Artois, he would rent a ‘large…and very convenient’ house from where he would attempt to turn the ebbing fortunes of English Catholicism. ‘We cannot’, he would later write, ‘wait for better times; we must act now (to make them better).’ If the recalcitrant students of Oxford were to be summarily expelled from college whenever Europe threatened and if the men and women of England were to continue compromising their salvation in the name of political survival, then Dr William Allen had found the answer: use the former to educate the latter. It was a simple solution and it would prove devastatingly effective.³⁵

* When Thomas Cromwell was made Chancellor of Cambridge in 1535, on the execution of Cardinal John Fisher, Oxford graduates saw Government preferment steered past them towards the students of Cambridge.

* Each college was provided at its foundation with an external ‘visitor’—part trouble-shooting ombudsman, part spiritual inquisitor.

* De Feria believed that the leading Catholics, in both the Commons and the Lords, had failed to put up a convincing fight during the crucial parliamentary debates from which the settlement sprang. However the Catholics were also under-represented in these debates: ten out of the twenty-six bishoprics were empty when Parliament opened on 25 January.

* Mrs Williams of the Swan was more than usually defiant in receiving Catholic priests: her husband was a justice of the peace and a city alderman.

* England’s sense of growing isolation from the rest of Europe, in spite of these entanglements, features strongly in the State Papers of the time. The Spanish ambassador reported back to Philip II a speech made by Sir William Cecil to the House of Commons in 1563, in which Cecil declared, ‘They had no one now to trust but themselves, for the Germans, although they had promised the Queen great things, had done nothing and had broken their word.’

* She is depicted as such in the Rainbow Portrait of c.1600 and was the subject of Walter Ralegh’s Book of the Ocean to Cynthia, in which he describes the anguished nature of his relationship with the Queen.

† Cecil’s own choice of suitably non-controversial debating matter for the week ahead was ‘Why is ophthalmia catching, but not dropsy or gout?’

* At the start of the sixteenth century Erasmus had placed English learning second only to that found in the Italian universities. Elizabeth’s concern over the standard of education in England extended as far as exempting schoolmasters from paying tax.