Читать книгу God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests and the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot - Alice Hogge - Страница 7

‘The very flower of the two universities, Oxford and Cambridge, was

carried away, as it were, by a storm, and scattered in foreign lands.’

Edward Rishton, 1585

THE 1560S ENDED with a warning clap of thunder, audible across France and all the way to distant Spain. Rebellion! As the Catholic nations of Europe listened in, England rang to the sounds of revolt.

The uprising was led by the powerful northern earls Percy and Neville, names guaranteed since the Wars of the Roses to strike fear into the heart of any English monarch, let alone one as vulnerable as Elizabeth. Their rebellion marked the last dying gasp of the old feudal order. More than that, it was the angry response of a disgruntled aristocracy, shouldered out of its long-held place in the sun by middle-class arrivistes like the Queen’s chief minister Sir William Cecil. The Percy/Neville proclamation raged against those ‘evil disposed persons, about the queen’s majesty, [who] have, by their subtle and crafty dealing to advance themselves…abused the queen, disordered the realm, and now, lastly, seek and procure the destruction of the nobility’.¹

But to rally supporters to their cause the rebels cloaked themselves in the flag of Catholicism. They marched to Durham Cathedral where they tore up the new English Prayer Book and Bible, demanding the restoration of ‘the true and catholic religion’. If this was what it took to spur the slumbering northern counties into action behind them then Percy and Neville were more than happy to make it their campaign slogan—neither man felt any long-standing loyalty to the new Church. Hidden further down the list were their more sought-after demands: the immediate arrest and trial of Cecil and the release from prison of the disgraced Duke of Norfolk.²

Elizabeth’s response was swift and uncharacteristically brutal. Between 500 and 800 men, all of very little account, were rounded up and executed. Percy and Neville fled the country and the decade closed on a note of queasy anticipation. It did not help that since 1568, Mary Queen of Scots had been living in England as Elizabeth’s prisoner. This was the Mary, half Scottish, half French, wholly Catholic, who had claimed Elizabeth’s crown as her own some ten years earlier. Mary had lost her French throne on the death of her first husband, her Scottish throne on the murder of her second. Now separated from her third husband, there were many who thought that, as Elizabeth’s presumed heir, she was entitled to another throne yet—England’s.

Then in February 1570 a new Pope, Pius V, a fanatical firebrand of great zeal but uncertain common sense, took it upon himself to fuel the conflagration further. He issued his bull Regnans in Excelsis, excommunicating ‘Elizabeth, pretended queen of England’, releasing English Catholics from their allegiance to her, and openly encouraging her overthrow, an appalling concept in a world that believed in a monarch’s divine right to rule. And the rulers of Europe were duly appalled, particularly as none was at present in the position to make good Pius’s threat. Philip II of Spain refused to let the bull be published anywhere in his dominions, openly reassuring Elizabeth that he had no intention of breaking the Anglo-Spanish amity. Privately, he complained that the Pope had ‘allowed himself to be carried away by his zeal’. The Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian fired off an angry response to Pius, receiving in return the peevish reply: ‘Why she [Elizabeth] makes such a stir about this sentence we cannot quite understand; for if she thinks so much of our sentence and excommunication, why does she not return to the bosom of the Church, from which she went out? If she thinks it of no consequence, why does she make such a stir about it?’³

But Pius had achieved what Protestant Parliamentarians had so far only dreamed of. In showing that a strict adherence to the Catholic faith was now mutually incompatible with loyalty to Elizabeth, he had bound Anglicanism to Englishness more firmly than ever. And he had given to an anxious English nation the cast-iron proof that the more devout the Catholic, the more danger they presented to the realm. The problem for England’s Catholics was that as the roots of Elizabeth’s new Church began to take hold, the only active Catholics left in the country were, perforce, devout ones. When Edwin Sandys, Bishop of London, opened the Parliamentary session of 1571 with a sermon at Westminster Abbey warning ‘This liberty, that men may openly profess diversity of religion, must needs be dangerous’, he revealed just how important to the nation’s sense of security a solid connection between Church and State had become. He continued, ‘One God, one king, one faith, one profession is fit for one Monarchy and Commonwealth. Division weakeneth.’⁴

Paranoia ran rife throughout the 1570s, stalking through the courts of Europe, trailing terror and swift acts of bloody reprisal in its wake. In 1572 some two thousand French Protestants were slaughtered by their Catholic countrymen in Paris on St Bartholomew’s Eve, an act that imprinted itself indelibly upon the consciousness of every European Protestant; the French Catholics responsible claimed they had attacked only because they thought they were about to be murdered themselves. Continent-wide, an epidemic of fear and suspicion was spreading. The ideological gulf between Catholicism and Protestantism had reached unparalleled proportions. For the Protestants, the sight of a renewed and invigorated Catholic Church—leaner and keener since the Council of Trent had given it a much needed shake-up—lent substance to the rumours that the Catholics were regrouping for a crusading attack against them.* For the Catholics, meanwhile, the consolidation of the Protestant position only increased the fear that this insidious spread of revolutionary thought would continue, destroying the traditional structure of the civilized world and consigning everyone in it to the fires of hell. Not surprisingly there was little room for compromise. The very words ‘Papist’ and ‘Heretic’ carried sufficient emotional charge to unite one side in loathing of the other.⁵

To come of age in the 1570s, like John Gerard in Lancashire and Nicholas Owen in Oxford, was to grow to awareness in the uneasy stillness that heralds a distant but inevitable storm. And picked out brightly against the decade’s darkening sky was a series of events, the intervals between which might be counted out like the silence between lightning and thunder to show how fast the storm was approaching.

Early in 1573 a package of letters from the Continent fell into the hands of Bishop Edwin Sandys. Sandys dispatched a party of royal messengers—the ominously named pursuivants—to bring in the intended recipients, and the pursuivants took the well-trodden road to Oxford.† ⁶

There, they rounded up a handful of students for questioning, but one of the names on their list was missing: Cuthbert Mayne, a West Countryman and member of St John’s College, was away visiting relatives. Friends quickly passed word to the student that it would be unwise for him to return to university and soon Mayne found himself boarding a ship off the coast of Cornwall and sailing for Flanders and the English College at Douai.⁷

Over the next few years many more packages arrived in Oxford. Their contents were identical—invitations, from one friend to another, to join the growing fraternity of students overseas—and their summonses were answered by vast numbers of Oxford’s disaffected undergraduates. Such was the siren call of Douai.

Then, in 1574, just a year after Mayne’s hurried departure to the Continent, four other young Englishmen—one a former fellow of Mayne’s old college, St John’s—made a second and even more significant Channel crossing. Their names were Lewis Barlow, Martin Nelson, Thomas Metham and Henry Shaw. They were recent graduates of the Douai College and all were newly ordained Catholic priests. Their journey took them from the Low Countries back home again, in secret, to England. Dr William Allen’s solution had been put in motion.⁸

The English College of the University of Douai, William Allen’s brainchild, was born out of frustration. Allen had departed Oxford in 1561 refusing to swear the Oath of Supremacy required of him by the university authorities, and his flight had taken him as far as the University of Louvain in the Low Countries. There he discovered a flourishing community of English exiles living in two large houses, to which they had given the names Oxford and Cambridge and from which they released a stream of anti-Protestant publications to be smuggled back to England. Allen set to work with a will. When ill health forced him to return home in the summer of 1562, he found among the leaderless English Catholics a religious apathy in stark contrast to the vigour of Louvain.⁹

For the next two and a half years Allen toured England, trying single-handedly, but with isolated success, to communicate a sense of Louvain’s vitality to his friends. His dismay at their complacency and their willingness to compromise grew steadily all the while. The Pope’s recent ruling that Catholics should not attend Church of England services had been widely ignored. Those ‘who believed the faith in their hearts and heard mass at home when they could’ were still frequenting their local parish churches, heedless of the dangers of this ‘damnable sin of schism’, wrote Allen. No matter how they blamed the Government’s laws for ‘their unlawful acts’, England’s Catholics were heading for ‘the miserable abyss of destruction’. Elizabeth’s policy seemed to be working: the old religion was dying by degrees—and not through persecution but through isolation and lack of spiritual guidance. Indeed, it was a measure of the Government’s live and let live policy at the time that Allen was permitted to remain so long in England, given his efforts to persuade his friends to break the law. But by the spring of 1565, aware that the Government’s patience was not to be tried indefinitely and worn down by the Sisyphean nature of his chosen task, Allen departed for Louvain once more. There the situation at home continued to haunt him. The remedy, though, proved elusive.¹⁰

Then in the autumn of 1567 Allen travelled to Rome in search of a position as chaplain to the English Hospice there. The opening did not materialize and he set off back to Flanders, accompanied by his friend Dr Jean Vendeville of the University of Douai. Vendeville had just failed to persuade Pope Pius to support his proposal for a crusade against the Turks, but the two friends’ conversation over the course of their journey north delivered up an answer to their respective disappointments: couple Vendeville’s thwarted missionary zeal with Allen’s desire to save England’s wavering Catholics. So began the ‘oasis in the wilderness of exile’.¹¹

Within a few weeks of its opening, on 29 September 1568, Vendeville was writing that the new English College boasted a handful of men ‘of great ability and promise’. And from the start the Douai seminary looked very much like being an Oxford affair. Among its first members were John Marshall, former Dean of Christ Church College, Richard Bristow, MA of Christ Church and fellow of Exeter College, and Edward Rishton, MA of Exeter College. Only one of the new English students, John White, was not an Oxford man.¹²

What news of this reached Oxford? What shape did the rumours take as quickly and quietly they spread about the town? That William Allen had founded a college where exiled scholars ‘might live and study together more profitably than apart’? That he was preparing a school of men ‘to restore religion when the proper moment should arrive’? That Dr Vendeville saw England as the next great mission?¹³

For many this was welcome news. The Parliament of 1563 had further extended the Oath of Supremacy to all in, or taking, holy orders, to all lawyers, MPs and schoolmasters, and to all university graduates. For good measure, the House of Commons was also insisting on harsher punishments for those refusing to swear to the oath. As Sir William Cecil observed: ‘such be the humours of the Commons House, as they think nothing sharp enough against Papists’. A first offence brought with it the penalties of praemunire: loss of lands and life imprisonment. For a second refusal the sentence was death. The new measures brought sharply into focus the choices available to Oxford’s students.¹⁴

Loyalty to Elizabeth carried with it the promise of advancement in a country crying out for new priests for its newest Church. It might also be a path to high office in the service of a queen looking to employ ‘men meaner in substance, and younger in years’ in her Government, in place of those ambitious aristocrats dismissive of a female ruler and powerful enough to challenge her. Loyalty to Elizabeth was something Elizabeth herself, with her charm, her flirtatiousness and her calculated displays of majesty, was most keen to encourage—not surprisingly given the vulnerability of her throne.¹⁵

Loyalty to your conscience, on the other hand, led to certain ruin: to separation from friends, estrangement from family and crippling poverty—just as the nation’s economy began to stabilize. A letter home from one young Englishman who chose conscience over country illustrated the emotional and financial cost of his decision: ‘Pray crave my parents’ blessing for me, and confer with my mother, and ascertain whether if I should come home, it would turn my father to me.’ And, he added desperately: ‘my wants are very great. Pray be a means to them [my parents] to help me’. Another letter, this time from the exiled Thomas, Lord Copley, uncle to the Jesuit-poet Robert Southwell, set out the price of conscience clearer still: ‘I love my country, friends, and kinsfolk, but I must be content patiently to forbear the comfort of them all, as I am taught by our Saviour himself, rather than to forsake him’. And William Shakespeare, in his play Richard II of c.1595, would sum up the pains of exile in a couplet:

Then thus I turn me from my country’s light, To dwell in solemn shades of endless night.¹⁶

So why was any Oxford student prepared to make this sacrifice? Of course, for some it must always have been for the sheer excitement of going up against the Establishment. But it was one thing to attend secret mass at the Mitre Inn, to pass on in stolen whispers the latest news from Douai, to argue long into the night in the rarefied, ivoried, once-removed atmosphere of academia—quite another to go over to the other side altogether.

For John Gerard, his reason was that of tradition; perhaps, too, an unspoken need to settle an old score: ‘My parents had always been Catholics,’ he wrote, ‘and on that account had suffered much at the hands of an heretical government.’ (Curiously, his was a self-censored family history: his grandfather, Thomas Gerard, had been burnt at the stake at Smithfield in London on 30 July 1540, as a convert to Lutheranism.) In Gerard’s fellow Jesuit, Robert Southwell’s, case, Catholicism was ‘the belief which to all my friends by descent and pedigree is, in manner, hereditary’. But for numerous others—such as Cuthbert Mayne, raised by his uncle, a Protestant parson—the old faith was not their old faith. Rather, the ‘Old religion [had] renewed its youth’ from among the ranks of many families who had already forsaken it. Those students who chose to leave Oxford for Douai, to sacrifice a life of opportunity for one of danger and penury, did so on the basis of ideological certainty.¹⁷

For some, their certainty sprang from a conviction that Parliament, ‘which has not long used to judge causes of faith, or prescribe ecclesiastical laws’ (so wrote Lord Copley), had no mandate to tell them what to believe. Others, looking about them at the bloodshed and chaos, the failed harvests and famine that had so blighted England in the preceding decades, saw God’s hand at work—their country was being punished for the sin of challenging the established Church. For such students, on the brink of entering this world of bloodshed and chaos for themselves, here was a way of drawing its poison. In Robert Southwell’s words, it now became their ‘duty…by the gentleness of [their] manners, the fire of [their] charity, by innocence of life and an example of all virtues, so to shine upon the world as to lift up the Res Christiana that now droops so sadly, and to build up again from the ruins what others by their vices have brought so low’. Still more young undergraduates believed that England had been betrayed by its Government—a Government more concerned with its own immediate survival than with the salvation of the nation. Elizabeth herself might have learned the value of political compromise at a very early age; most Oxford students had never had that need and saw no reason to acquire it now—not with the souls of their countrymen at stake. Later they would be charged with betraying those same countrymen to Spain—their defence would be that the true betrayal had not been theirs, but had come many decades prior to them setting out for Douai.¹⁸

In a poem of 1581-5 Robert Southwell wrote:

Then crop the morning Rose while it is fair;

Our day is short, the evening makes it die.

Yield God the prime of youth ’ere it impair,

Lest he the dregs of crooked age deny.¹⁹

Whatever their motives for escaping to Douai, at William Allen’s disposal now was the prime of Oxford youth.

At first Allen did not envisage sending the graduates of his Douai seminary back home to England as missionaries; the impetus for this was Jean Vendeville’s and came later. Rather, he thought to prepare them for the happy moment—Elizabeth’s death or a foreign invasion—when England would again need Catholic priests. But the syllabus he devised for them was a blueprint training manual for a very specific kind of ‘holy war’.²⁰

The students would remain at the college for three years. In that time they would learn Greek and Hebrew to augment their existing knowledge of Latin. With these three languages at their disposal they could read the scriptures in their original form, so as ‘to save them from being entangled in the sophisms which heretics extract from the properties and meanings of words’. They would study their Bibles with painstaking detail, working through the Old Testament at least twelve times and the New Testament sixteen times. And each week there would be debates in which the students would ‘defend in turn not only the Catholic side against the texts of Scripture alleged by the heretics, but also the heretical side against those which Catholics bring forward’. Thus armed, they would ‘all know better how to prove our doctrines by argument and to refute the contrary opinions’.

For the advanced students there would be a further course of study: English, the ‘vulgar tongue’. ‘In this respect’, wrote Allen, ‘the heretics, however ignorant they may be on other points, have the advantage over many of the more learned Catholics.’ The Protestants’ use of the Bible in translation gave them an advantage over Allen’s priests when preaching to those unschooled in Latin. English classes would correct the inaccuracy and ‘unpleasant hesitation’ with which many of his trainee missionaries interpreted their scriptures. And William Allen was preparing for a war in which any inaccuracy or hesitation could have devastating consequences.

It was to be a war of words and will in which the sharpest weapons would be the combatant’s ability to argue his cause clearly and persuasively, and his unwavering belief in the rightness of that cause. To this latter end it was Allen’s ‘first and foremost study’ to stir up ‘in the minds of Catholics, especially of those who are preparing here for the Lord’s work, a zealous and just indignation against the heretics’ and to set before ‘the eyes of the students the…utter desolation of all things sacred…the chief impieties, blasphemies, absurdities, cheats and trickeries of the English heretics’. ‘The result’, wrote Allen, ‘is that they not only hold the heretics in perfect detestation, but they also marvel and feel sorrow of heart that there should be any found so wicked, simple and reckless of their salvation.’

It was incendiary teaching. And it proved overwhelmingly popular. In December 1575 Allen was summoned to Rome to advise the Pope on the foundation of a second seminary there. By the following year the original Douai College had grown to fill three houses. Swarms of students were ‘daily coming, or rather flying to the college’, they were among ‘the best wits in England’ and many were former students of Oxford University.²¹

But not even Douai could escape the decade’s disease: paranoia. Throughout the 1570s, as Philip of Spain’s army battled to stamp out Protestantism in the Spanish-owned Netherlands, the rumours spread that Allen’s students were spies for the Catholic cause. An entry in the Douai Diary of 27 June 1577 reads: ‘Dr Bristow admonished us to be more guarded in our behaviour and, as far as possible, to walk less frequently in the streets, because the common people had begun…to spread reports and excite murmurs against us.’ By August the students were whispering about a coming raid on the college. Finally, in the spring of 1578 the seminary was expelled from the city. The trainee missionaries decamped to Reims, the French university city, where, under the protection of the powerful Guise family, they hoped to continue their studies free from suspicion. It was not to be. By September 1578 Allen was writing to the Governor of Reims, begging him to calm the populace’s fears that his students were armed English insurrectionists who went about in disguise to check and measure the town’s fortifications.²²

But some of the paranoia was justified. On the feast of Candlemas, 2 February 1579, a former stationer’s apprentice, Anthony Munday, and his friend Thomas Nowell arrived at the newly formed English College in Rome. Since William Allen’s visit to the city four years earlier, the plans to open a seminary on the site of the old English pilgrim’s hostel had come on apace. By the time of Munday’s visit the college already held forty-two students, including the young Robert Southwell.²³

Munday and Nowell were offered eight days’ entertainment at the college, ‘which by the Pope was granted to such Englishmen as come thither’. For Munday the invitation was followed by an awkward encounter. Earlier in his adventures he had been mistaken by a group of young Englishmen in Paris for the son of a prominent Catholic gentleman. This had afforded him a warm welcome and a number of letters of introduction to Rome so Munday had done nothing to disabuse his new friends of their notion. But now in Rome he was greeted by a priest who knew this Catholic gentleman well. Munday spent an uncomfortable evening parrying questions and ‘was put to so hard a shift that I knew not well what to say’. When the supper-bell rang he fled with relief and thereafter did his best to avoid his interrogator.²⁴

In the days that followed Munday had ample time to record in detail his impressions of seminary life, from morning study and prayers, through the daily tuition in divinity, logic and rhetoric, to the student chatter around the fireside at night. But Anthony Munday was a Protestant. In time he would become a professional informer.

Munday’s diary of his stay in Rome is the first recorded memoir written by a spy. It must, however, be read with a certain scepticism: his target audience was a paying public eager to believe the worst about the seminary, and his literary credibility is dubious.* Moreover, his claims are suspicious. The students, he wrote, competed amongst themselves as to ‘who shall speak worst of her Majesty’, while their teachers were as insulting about her ministers: Francis Bacon appears as ‘the Butcher’s son, the great guts, oh he would fry well with a Faggot’; Ambrose Dudley becomes ‘a good fat whoreson, to make Bacon of’. (Significantly, Sir Thomas Bromley, to whom Munday dedicated the work, does not feature in this list of gibes.† ) And somewhat at odds with the ill-concealed relish of Munday’s descriptions is his politic disclaimer that all these ministers were, of course, ‘honourable personages, to whom the words do offer great abuse, and whom I unfeignedly reverence and honour’.²⁵

But if much of Munday’s account reads like the work of an entertaining profiteer looking to sell a few books at the Government’s expense, certain facts in his story do ring true, particularly when viewed in conjunction with William Allen’s syllabus at Douai and Reims. Each mealtime the students listened to readings from the Bible to arm them for the fight against heresy. They took part in daily disputations to sharpen their skills in debate. And encouraged by Allen, who explained that ‘We must needs confess that all these things have come upon our country through our sins’, they undertook public penance for the most minor infringement of the college rules. Munday, who in his brief stay ‘was always apt to break one order or other’, wrote with feeling about these penances. But it was his description of the students’ self-flagellation that was most arresting. The penitent student entered the dining room dressed in a long canvas robe with a hole cut in its back, hooded to hide his identity and carrying a short-handled whip with ‘forty or fifty cords at it, about the length of half a yard: with a great many hard knots on every cord, and some of the whips have through every knot at the end crooked wires, which will tear the flesh unmercifully’. The student then walked up and down the room, whipping his back until the blood ran. Scourging was familiar among monastic orders as a means of discipline and it was still the recognized punishment for any priest found guilty of the disparate crimes of blasphemy, concubinage and simony (the selling of ecclesiastical privileges). Self-scourging was popular among the more ascetic orders as a means of mortification. But the picture Munday paints is reminiscent of the Flagellants, the fanatical sect that sprang up out of the plague-stricken thirteenth century and who whipped themselves until they bled in reparation for the sins of the world.* Allen’s holy warriors, it seemed, were taking upon themselves the sins of the English nation.²⁶

Munday’s intrusion into life at the English College in Rome suggested Allen’s missionaries-in-training could not long remain isolated from the outside world. Allen’s own behaviour, however, had made a collision between priests and government spies inevitable. For in an age of high intrigue, William Allen was fast becoming an arch-intriguer.

On his journey to Rome in 1575 Allen coupled talks on the foundation of the new seminary with detailed discussions about a forthcoming Spanish-backed invasion of England; he only came away from the Holy City when it was felt his ‘prolonged stay [there] might arouse suspicion in that woman [Elizabeth]’. He was also in contact with the imprisoned Mary, Queen of Scots, recommending a trustworthy courier as her go-between with the outside world. And his regular correspondence with New College exile Nicholas Sanders reveals the extent to which these two Oxford graduates now valued their influence in the murky world of European affairs. Sanders wrote to Allen

‘We shall have no steady comfort but from God, in the A [the Pope] not the X [Philip II]. Therefore I beseech you to take hold of A, for X is as fearful of war as a child is of fire, and all his endeavour is to avoid all such occasions. The A will give two thousand [troops], when you shall be content with them. If they do not serve to go to England, at the least they will serve to go to Ireland. The state of Christendom dependeth upon the stout assailing of England.’

Clearly, William Allen had begun to align himself with the more overtly political of the Catholic agitators, in addition to his own self-appointed task as director of missionaries. What was unclear was precisely how he intended to keep these two roles separate in the public mind. For separate they must be if his young priests were to be seen as agents of God rather than agents of a foreign power.²⁷

His answer, if he and his Reims and Roman College graduates were to be believed over Anthony Munday, was this: all discussion of English affairs of state was banned among the seminary students. Elizabeth’s name was never to be mentioned, neither in lectures nor in recreation. No student was to debate the extent of the Pope’s authority over Christian rulers and no reference was to be made to the Pope’s right to depose a monarch from their throne. William Allen was training his students ‘so that they may serve the one side without offence to the other, which is the hardest thing in the world where the two contrary parties be man and God’. His solution was single-minded. No matter how sullied his own reputation was fast becoming, his missionaries-in-training would be political virgins. It was a theoretical distinction that might have made perfect sense in the classroom; what was less certain was whether it could ever make perfect sense in the outside world, particularly in England. Allen might have trained his students in the art of disputation, he might have schooled them in the scriptures, he might have fired them up with a hatred of heresy and inured them to physical pain. But he was sending them into a country whose Queen stood under sentence of deposition from the very Church they represented, and the only protection he had given them, their only defence against the charge of being agitators and secret agents, was that they had not been allowed to discuss politics during their training. More useful would have been detailed discussions about the realities of the political situation into which they were about to be dropped, about the theological doubts concerning Pope Pius’ right to depose the Queen, about the impossibility of separating religion from politics in a country whose Church was a construct of Parliament. Had Allen’s holy warriors been equipped to live for the cause or simply to die for it?* As they left the safe confines of Douai for the cold and treacherous waters of their homeland the answer would soon become apparent.²⁸

On the night of 24 April 1576 the thirty-two-year-old Cuthbert Mayne, newly ordained into the Catholic Church, made the short Channel crossing to England, one of eighteen Douai graduates to make the journey that year. At daybreak he stepped ashore on the south coast, home again after an absence of three years. He was supplied with letters of introduction to the Catholic Sir Francis Tregian of Golden House in Cornwall, so, after taking leave of his fellow missionary John Payne, he set off for the West Country.²⁹

The journey was long and nerve-racking as Mayne tried to avoid the ever present shire watches on the lookout for vagabonds and agitators. To be stopped meant to be questioned and to be questioned meant putting his cover story to unwelcome scrutiny.

Keeping well to the south of Barnstaple, near which he had been born and where he was certain of being recognized, Mayne arrived at last at Golden House. Here, in his new disguise as the Tregian family’s steward, he began working as William Allen had trained him, travelling the Tregian estates between Truro and Launceston, saying mass for the faithful and reconciling to the Church any who had faltered. Summer turned peacefully to autumn. In December that year news filtered slowly through the country of the Queen’s clash with her new Archbishop of Canterbury and her displeasure at his Puritan leanings. Christmas and Easter were celebrated at Golden House with full Catholic ceremony. Spring turned to summer. On 8 June 1577 Cuthbert Mayne was sitting in the gardens of Golden House when a party of some one hundred men rode into view. At their head was the new High Sheriff of Cornwall, Richard Grenville, a ruthless naval adventurer with no love of Catholicism. Mayne rose quietly from his seat and left the garden ‘where he might have gone from them’, heading for his room.³⁰

But Grenville was acting on inside information: ‘the first place they went unto was M. Mayne’s chamber, which being fast shut, they bounced and beat at the door. M. Mayne came and opened it’. To Grenville’s question ‘What art thou?’ Mayne answered simply ‘I am a man’. But when Grenville ripped open Mayne’s doublet he found about his neck an Agnus Dei case. Agnus Deis were small wax discs made from the Easter candles, impressed with an image of the paschal lamb and blessed by the Pope. They had been outlawed by Parliament in 1571. The penalty for possessing one was death. Among Mayne’s papers was found a copy of a papal bull, issued by Pope Pius’s successor, Gregory XIII. These, too, had been outlawed by Parliament in 1571, in response to Pius’s Bull Regnans. To bring any papal bull into the country was now a treasonable offence. So Cuthbert Mayne, former fellow of St John’s College, Oxford and graduate of William Allen’s seminary, was arrested and borne triumphantly away, first to Truro and then to the dank, underground castle gaol at Launceston.³¹

At the Michaelmas Assizes, Mayne was led out before Sir Roger Marwood, Chief Baron of the Exchequer, and indicted on five counts, the most serious being the obtaining of a papal bull and the publishing of that bull in England. The sentence was death for high treason. It mattered little that the papal bull had expired, had no bearing on English affairs and had not in fact been distributed by Mayne since his arrival in England; Mayne claimed he had only brought it with him by mistake. It mattered less that the judges themselves were worried by the verdict and sent urgently to the Council for advice on how to proceed. The Council was by now extremely concerned by the reports it was receiving from its spies of an influx of Douai graduates into the country—some thirty priests had arrived home since the return of the first four pioneers in 1574—and was in no mood for mercy. The sentence stood.³²

Then on the morning of 29 November Mayne was offered his life. If he would swear on the Bible that Elizabeth was the supreme head of the Church of England he would be spared execution. Mayne refused. He went further: he reasserted his belief that England would soon be restored to the Catholic faith by the ‘secret instructors’ from Douai. And then, sealing his fate (and stepping outside the strictly apolitical role being claimed by Allen for his students), he declared that should ‘any Catholic prince…invade any realm to reform the same to the authority of the See of Rome, that then the Catholics in that realm…should be ready to assist and help them’. The offer of a reprieve was rescinded.³³

Cuthbert Mayne was ‘drawn a quarter of a mile to the place of execution, and when he was to be laid on the sled, some of the Justices moved the Sheriff’s deputy, that he would cause him to have his head laid over the car, that it might be dashed against the stones in drawing, and M. Mayne offered himself that it might be so, but the Sheriff’s deputy would not suffer it’. This sheriff’s deputy was a merciful man. He let Mayne hang until he was dead before disembowelling him, quartering him, and distributing his parts about the county for display. For his role in the affair, Sir Francis Tregian was sentenced to life imprisonment and his estates were seized and given to Sir George Carey, a cousin of the Queen.* John Stow, in his Chronicle of that year, recorded: ‘Cuthbert Maine [sic] was drawn, hanged and quartered at Launceston, in Cornwall, for preferring Roman power.’³⁴

Cuthbert Mayne had become the Douai seminary’s first martyr. When his old master at Oxford learned of his death he exclaimed, ‘Wretch that I am, how has that novice distanced me! May he be favourable to his old friend and tutor! I shall now boast of these titles more than ever.’ Such was the power of dying for your faith, and not even the fact that Mayne had been executed as a traitor to his country could tarnish this. Yes, he had broken existing treason laws, but did anyone seriously believe that owning an out-of-date copy of a nondescript bull and a few wax discs posed a threat to national security?³⁵

However, as the dust settled on Mayne’s quartered remains and the political post-mortem began, it was soon clear that neither side had won a decisive victory in this opening skirmish. Catholics could claim that Cuthbert Mayne was a traitor only according to the most rigid set of definitions, in regard to his possession of a papal bull, or on the basis of hypothesis alone, in regard to his attitude towards Catholic invasions. But in regard to that same attitude, the English Government could claim that Allen’s supposed political virgins were uncommonly quick to pronounce on matters apart from their faith. Blessed martyr of a persecuted Church, or secret agent of an enemy state? Cuthbert Mayne had become all things to all men. His foolishness in being caught with Agnus Deis and a papal bull, and his clumsy defence of the Pope’s powers of deposition had left Catholics confirmed in their belief that they were being penalized for their religion, and the Government confirmed in its belief that Allen’s seminarians were stirring for invasion. The battle lines had just been made clearer.

But for the young missionaries-in-training, Mayne’s execution revealed to them that here was a war they might wage for the ultimate prize: the crown of martyrdom itself.* Just months after Mayne’s death the Catacombs were unearthed beneath the city of Rome, to ecstatic celebration among Catholics: here was proof that they and their Church were the direct descendants of those early Christian martyrs, sprung from their blood and their bones. And for a new generation the chance to save that Church was being offered to them again.

‘Listen to our heavenly Father asking back his talents with usury; listen to the Church, the mother that bore us and nursed us, imploring our help; listen to the pitiful cries of our neighbours in danger of spiritual starvation; listen to the howling of the wolves that are spoiling the flock. The glory of your Father, the preservation of your mother, your own salvation, the safety of your brethren, are in jeopardy, and can you stand idle?…Do not, I pray you, regard such a tragedy as a joke; sleep not while the enemy watches; play not while he devours his prey; relax not in idleness and vanity while he is dabbling in your brother’s blood…See then, my dearest and most instructed youths, that you lose none of this precious time, but carry a plentiful and rich crop away from this seminary, enough to supply the public wants, and to gain for ourselves the reward of dutiful sons.’

With such words ringing in their ears it was little wonder that, to their mentor William Allen, the student priests seemed ‘like men striving with all their might to put out a conflagration. They cannot in any way be kept back from England’.³⁶

During Elizabeth’s first Parliament, Sir Thomas White, founder of St John’s College, Oxford and a staunch Catholic, had exclaimed in fury and despair that ‘it was unjust that a religion begun in such a miraculous way, and established by such grave men, should be abolished by a set of beardless boys’. Some twenty years on, the job of saving White’s miraculous religion had fallen to another set of beardless boys. As William Cecil would write, with an old man’s frustration at youth’s idealism, ‘The greatest number of papists is of very young men.’ In a few years’ time John Gerard and Nicholas Owen would be old enough to join their number. Meanwhile in Prague, a former fellow of White’s college, and the author of that rallying call to the students at Douai’s seminary, was about to step into the fray. His name was Edmund Campion.³⁷

* The Council of Trent met in three sessions during the mid-sixteenth century, its purpose to revivify the Roman Church, enabling it to meet the challenge of Protestantism. The Council worked to establish a set of fixed doctrinal definitions for the Catholic faith and to re-order its institutional structure, emphasizing the subordination of the entire Catholic hierarchy to the Pope. Out of the Council of Trent sprang what has been termed the Counter-Reformation, a movement almost as amorphous as the Reformation it opposed, but which can loosely be defined as the attempt at re-conquest of those parts of Christendom lost to the Catholic Church. Rome’s army of arguers, as featured in this book, was a component of this movement.

† According to a contemporary Catholic description, ‘The pursuivants [were], for the most part, bankrupts and needy fellows, either fled from their trade for debt, and by the queen’s badge to get their protection, or some notorious wicked man.’

* Munday would later pass off his play about Sir John Oldcastle as being by William Shakespeare. In Henry IV Part I, the character of Falstaff was originally called Sir John Oldcastle. This was changed when Oldcastle’s descendants complained about the slur on their ancestor’s name. In Act I.ii.40 Hal addresses Falstaff as ‘my old lad of the castle’.

† Cecil and Leicester, whose names also appear in the dedication to Munday’s book, do feature in this list. Cecil received a veiled compliment on his ‘wit’; of Leicester, Munday wrote that the comments made against him were ‘not here to be rehearsed’—a tactful remark under the circumstances.

* The Flagellants’ movement spread throughout Europe, reaching England in the fourteenth century. There, they were regarded with interest, though very few could be persuaded to join their numbers.

* In 1587 a memorial was presented to the Pope recommending Allen for the cardinalship. The memorial read: ‘He is unbiased, learned, of good manners, judicious, deeply versed in English affairs, and the negotiations for the submission of the country to the church, all of the instruments of which have been his pupils. So many amongst them have suffered martyrdom that it may be said that the purple of the cardinalate was dyed in the blood of the martyrs he has instituted.’

* Tregian was held captive for twenty-five years (some accounts say twenty-eight) and only released after King Philip of Spain intervened. He died in Lisbon in 1608.

* In 1583, Niccolo Circignani, called Pomerancio, painted a series of thirty-four frescoes for the Roman College church, depicting the history of Christianity in England, and stressing the importance of martyrdom. Recognizable figures were shown being hanged, drawn and quartered, so that the students would be in no doubt as to the fate awaiting them. The originals have perished; those frescoes in the tribune of the new church are copies, painted in 1893.