Читать книгу God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests and the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot - Alice Hogge - Страница 8

‘Campion is a champion, Him once to overcome,

The rest be well dressed

The sooner to mum.’

(Sixteenth century ballad)

DURING THE STATE VISIT to Oxford of 1566, before a packed house of royal dignitaries and university academics, Edmund Campion had impressed the young Queen Elizabeth with his skill at debating. Elizabeth, who admired a keen intellect every bit as much as the ability to hunt or dance, was delighted by Campion and the plaudits followed thick and fast. ‘Ask what you like for the present’, promised Oxford’s Chancellor and Elizabeth’s favourite, the Earl of Leicester; ‘the Queen and I will provide for the future.’* At the age of twenty-six this son of a London bookseller had England at his feet.¹

But Campion had taken a very different path from the one mapped out for him by the Queen and her courtiers. After his ordination into the Anglican Church in 1568 he had reportedly experienced great anguish of conscience. That same year it had been brought to the notice of the Grocers’ Company of London, from whom he held an exhibition scholarship, that he was ‘suspected to be of unsound judgement’ in religion. The guild ordered him to ‘come and preach at Paul’s Cross, in London’ so they might ‘clear the suspicions conceived of [him]’ and, more importantly, so he might ‘alter his mind in favouring the religion now authorised’. Otherwise, they added warningly, ‘the Company’s exhibition shall cease’. Campion declined their invitation and lost his scholarship. In 1569 he left Oxford for the more congenial—and more Catholic—shores of Ireland and in the summer of 1572 the man regarded by Sir William Cecil as ‘one of the diamonds of England’, with his own devoted group of followers known as Campionists, the man with an established reputation as a scholar and writer and an assured position in the hierarchy of the new English Church, threw it all away and sailed for Douai. ‘It is a very great pity to see so notable a man leave his country,’ wrote Cecil.²

At Douai, under the instruction of William Allen, Campion became a Catholic priest and in Rome, to which he travelled following his ordination, he joined the Society of Jesus.* The long and painful struggle with his conscience was over. In March 1580, eight years after his flight to the Continent, he was summoned back to England.³

Up to now the Jesuits had not involved themselves in the English mission. They were, though, ideally suited to the task. If William Allen’s students were the ordinary foot soldiers in Rome’s army of arguers then Ignatius Loyola’s Jesuits were the special forces, physically toughened by strict, self-imposed hardships and vows of poverty, mentally strengthened by long periods of solitude and meditation, and well aware that education was the strongest weapon in the proselytizer’s armoury. ‘Give me a boy at the age of seven, and he will be mine for ever,’ declared Loyola. Within a decade of their formation the Jesuits had established colleges throughout Catholic Europe and were ranging as far afield as Mexico and Japan, the front lines of Christian conflict. Their startling success aroused fear among Protestants and resentment among their fellow Catholics. But to Loyola’s men this was holy war and in warfare the end justified the means.⁴

Having already lost many of his finest students, including Campion, to the elite new order, it was William Allen, always on the lookout for new ways to help England’s beleaguered Catholics, who suggested the Jesuits widen their range of operations to include the English mission. Why sacrifice the lives of English priests in far-flung corners of the world when there was ample work for them to do in their own homeland? First, though, he had to persuade the unwilling Jesuit General, Everard Mercurian, that England was worth the venture.* ⁵

Mercurian’s reluctance to send his men to England was deeprooted. He declared the Society already over-committed in other parts of the world. He ‘found divers difficulties…about their manner of living there [in England] in secular men’s houses in secular apparel…as how also their rules and orders for conservation of religious spirit might there be observed’. But most of all, he argued, as conditions in England now stood it would be impossible for his missionaries to maintain the kind of order, discipline and apoliticism in the line of fire on which the effectiveness of their work depended. How could he send his men into a political minefield like England and expect them to minister to Catholics while, at the same time, dodging the accusations of intrigue and treachery that would inevitably be hurled their way? And how could he ask them to do so in isolation, deprived of the support of their fellow Jesuits? Gradually, as the 1570s drew to a close, William Allen wore him down. He was helped in this by a fellow Oxford graduate and a Jesuit of some five years’ standing, Robert Persons.⁶

Robert Persons was a ‘fierce natured’, ‘impudent’ West Countryman, born at Nether Stowey in Somerset in 1546. In 1564, at the age of eighteen, he went up to Oxford, where he discovered Catholicism, first as a student at St Mary’s Hall, Allen’s old college, and then as a fellow of Balliol. By 1573, his new allegiance to the old faith had brought him to the attention of the authorities and his abrasive manner had offended sufficient of his colleagues and he was summarily expelled, ‘even with the public ringing of bells’. So Robert Persons took passage to the Continent. Once there he enrolled to study medicine at the University of Padua, but a chance meeting with a member of the Jesuits made a profound impression on the twenty-seven-year-old. After two years pursuing his medical studies, Robert Persons packed his bags and walked to Rome. On 25 June 1575 he joined the Society of Jesus, a day after his twenty-ninth birthday.⁷

Four years later Persons was writing privately to William Allen that among the English Jesuits there were ‘divers to adventure their blood in that mission [to England], among whom I put myself as one’. Faced with such zeal Mercurian finally gave way. A first Jesuit mission to England was ordered; Robert Persons was named as its commander and Edmund Campion was selected to accompany him. ‘The expense is reckoned,’ wrote Campion, ‘the enterprise is begun. It is of God, it cannot be withstood.’⁸

From Prague, where he was teaching Rhetoric at the university, Campion was ordered back to Rome to join Persons. Here, the pair were briefed for their mission. General Mercurian was at pains to stress the difficulties of living and working in disguise, of assuming and maintaining a false identity and of surviving alone without the support of the Society. He also pointed out the impossibility of retreat should the pressure grow too great. These hardships aside, their orders were clear. They were to work with those who were already favourable to the faith. They were to avoid all contact with the heretics. They were to ‘behave that all may see that the only gain they covet is that of souls’. They were not to entangle themselves ‘in affairs of State’, nor to send back political reports to Rome. They were not to speak against the Queen, except perhaps among those ‘whose fidelity has been long and steadfast and even then not without strong reasons’. And they were to carry with them nothing forbidden by English law: no papal bulls or Agnus Dei. This was a mission for ‘the preservation and augmentation of the Faith of the Catholics in England’ and it was not to be compromised by the amateurism that had tripped up Cuthbert Mayne.⁹

Campion and Persons departed Rome on 18 April 1580, waved off in triumph by the entire English colony there. With them rode a party of some twelve other English Catholics, including a lay brother of the Society, Ralph Emerson, who would act as their servant in England, and a group of young seminary priests also on their way to join the mission. One witness, Robert Owen, a Welsh Catholic studying in Rome, wrote to his friend Dr Humphrey Ely at Reims, ‘This day depart hence many of our countrymen thitherward, and withal good Father Campion.’ Within days the letter had been intercepted by an English spy and its contents passed on to Sir Francis Walsingham in London. Edmund Campion was ‘on the way to my warfare in England’ and England was expecting him.¹⁰

The party travelled on foot, using false names. Heavy rain dogged their passage through Italy. From Turin they climbed steadily upwards, crossing the Alps at Mont Cenis before descending again into the rich pastureland of the Savoy. From here they continued on to Lyons and on 31 May they came at last to the French university city of Reims.¹¹

But here some alarming news awaited them. Campion’s was not the only Catholic expedition to the British Isles that month. At the same time the Jesuit and his fellows had left Rome for England, five Spanish ships containing arms and men had left for Ireland. They sailed at the request of Campion’s Oxford contemporary Nicholas Sanders, now employed as a papal envoy. Their purpose was to assist the Irish rebel James Fitzmaurice unseat the ‘tyrant’ Elizabeth. And the man who had financed them was none other than Pope Gregory XIII.* Robert Persons noted his party’s reaction: ‘we were heartily sorry…because we plainly foresaw that this would be laid against us and other priests, if we should be taken in England, as though we had been privy or partakers thereof, as in very truth we were not, nor ever heard or suspected the same until this day’.¹²

Their situation grew still worse with the second piece of news that now reached them. English agents had provided the Privy Council with a full description of every member of the group and the Channel ports were being watched for their arrival. It was testimony to their courage that only one of the party, Thomas Goldwell, Bishop of St Asaph, now wavered. Goldwell took to his bed and began writing to the Pope to ask whether he was the best man for the job of supervising Allen’s missionaries. Indeed, he was not. He was seventy-nine years old, he had endured a gruelling journey from Rome and he was plainly terrified. His defection bore out William Allen’s belief that this was young man’s work. Allen himself remarked that ‘it was better the old man should yield to fear now than later on, on the other side’.† ¹³

But while Goldwell panicked in Reims, his fellow travellers, joined by three students from William Allen’s Reims seminary, pressed on with their journey, splitting up into groups of twos and threes and separating to the French ports, in preparation for finding their way across the Channel. Edmund Campion, Robert Persons and the Jesuit lay brother Ralph Emerson made their way to St Omer, a short distance outside Calais. For them rather more than for their fellows, the Pope’s interference in Irish affairs had serious implications.

When Francis Drake sailed into Plymouth harbour on 26 September 1580 after successfully circumnavigating the globe, his ship laden to the gunwales with Spanish treasure, few doubted his success had just hammered another nail into the coffin of Anglo-Spanish relations. The grumblers were soon heard to complain that ‘just because two or three of the principal courtiers send ships out to plunder in this way, their property must be thus imperilled and their country ruined’.* In reality Drake’s actions and Elizabeth’s evident delight in them—she attended a celebratory banquet in honour of his voyage at which she instructed the French ambassador to dub Drake a knight, and she happily pocketed her own share of the profits—were little more than an irritant to Philip II. By 1580 Spain’s star was firmly in the ascendant. Decisive victories in the Netherlands by the Duke of Parma, Philip’s new commander there, and Philip’s surprise succession to the throne of Portugal had left Elizabeth commenting grimly, ‘It will be hard to withstand the King of Spain now.’† ¹⁴

And whereas in the past England had relied on France to help maintain the precarious balance of European power, this was now impossible, no matter how much Elizabeth and the French Duc d’Alençon flirted and spoke of marriage all that year. For France had religious divisions of its own to contend with. In February 1580 the smouldering embers of Catholic-Protestant conflict had reignited once again and the country was now embroiled in its seventh War of Religion. So while France imploded, Philip was free to fix England within his sights without fear of opposition. As a good imperialist the prospect of invasion was tempting (particularly as he now also commanded the powerful Portuguese navy), but as a good Catholic his duty was clear to him. In 1578 Philip had instructed his ambassador to ‘endeavour to keep…[Elizabeth]…in a good humour and convinced of our friendship’. By 1580 he was openly backing the Irish rebel Fitzmaurice.¹⁵

With European stability deteriorating rapidly and the Spanish threat increasing daily, Pius’s Bull Regnans was now more pertinent than ever. For if a good Catholic was, by definition, a bad Englishman, then the influx of the Douai missionaries alone—no matter the effect they were having on the populace as a whole—had certainly added to the number of good Catholics in England. And joining them now were the Jesuits, whose founder was no nice Oxford boy with an unfortunate weakness for the old religion, but an ascetically minded Spaniard. Worse still, the Jesuits pledged obedience directly to the Pope.

Before leaving Rome Campion and Persons had been granted an audience with Pope Gregory. From him they had received a fresh clarification of the current position of Pius’s Bull in canon law to take with them to England. Gregory’s Explanatio declared it lawful for English Catholics to obey Elizabeth in civil matters while she was still de facto Queen and unlawful for them to depose her—but only for the time being. For while Pius had been sufficiently foolish to publish his Bull without giving a thought as to the enforcing of it, Gregory regarded himself as a more astute tactician. As soon as the political and military conditions were right, he explained, Pius’s Bull would be reactivated. He instructed Campion and Persons to deliver this ruling to England’s Catholics and with that he gave them his blessing. All Mercurian’s attempts to keep the religious aims of the Jesuits’ mission separate and distinct from the political machinations of Rome had been compromised at a single meeting.¹⁶

So Campion, Persons and Emerson came to the Jesuit house at St Omer to consult with their superiors. Did General Mercurian wish their mission to continue or had Pope Gregory’s interference in Ireland made it impossible for them to carry on safely? The discussions were tinged with doubt and anxiety but finally an agreement was reached: the mission would proceed as planned. They had all come far too far to stop now. Persons later wrote, ‘as we could not remedy the matters, and as our consciences were clear, we resolved through evil report or good report to go on with the purely spiritual action we had in hand; and if God destined any of us to suffer under a wrong title, it was only what he had done, and would be no loss’. Behind the bravado, though, lay a very real appreciation of the increased perils now facing them.¹⁷

The decision made, Campion, Persons and Emerson were directed to the house of George Chamberlain, an English Catholic living in exile in France. There, they were equipped with new disguises for their onward journey and some time after midnight on 16 June 1580, dressed in a buff leather coat with gold lace trim and a feathered hat, ‘under the habit and profession of a captain returned from the Low Countries’, Robert Persons made the short sea voyage from Calais to Dover. The mission was begun.¹⁸

Close surveillance was being kept on the English seaports. When Persons arrived at Dover on the morning of 17 June he was brought before the port authorities and cross-examined. His cover story and performance held up under the scrutiny. Many Englishmen looking for adventure had gone abroad to fight for the Dutch rebels and Persons had taken to his role with ease—Campion described him to Mercurian as ‘such a peacock, such a swaggerer, that a man needs must have very sharp eyes to catch a glimpse of any holiness and modesty shrouded beneath such a garb’—and so, after thorough interrogation, the Dover customs ‘found no cause of doubt in him, but let him pass with all favour, procuring him both a horse and all other things necessary for his journey’. One official proved sufficiently friendly for Persons to seize the initiative. He asked the man if he would forward a letter to his friend, a Mr Edmunds in St Omer, telling the ‘jewel merchant’ to come quickly to London where he would be met. And he asked the official to be sure to look out for his friend when he landed and see him safely on his journey. The letter was duly sent to the waiting Edmund Campion.¹⁹

From Dover, Persons rode north to Gravesend, arriving at nightfall. Here his luck continued. He boarded a waiting boat that took him upriver to London, depositing him at Southwark, on the south bank of the Thames, before dawn on the morning of 18 June. He had been on the move less than thirty-six hours.

But now his good fortune ran out. As Robert Persons came ashore in England’s waking capital he found that ‘the greatest danger of all seemed to be in London itself’. His immediate problem was that he could find nowhere to take him in, ‘by reason of the new proclamations and rumours against suspicious people that were to come’ from abroad. Every ‘inn where he went seemed to be afraid to receive him, and so much the more for that they might guess by the fashion of his apparel that he was come from beyond the seas’. His mercenary’s disguise had begun to work against him and for all the careful planning and for all that Allen’s seminary priests had been returning to England for the past six years, there was still no system in place to help a new arrival make contact with anyone prepared to assist him. Persons spent a bleak few hours walking the streets of the city. Finally, he ‘resolved to adventure into the prison of the Marshalsea and to ask for a gentleman prisoner there named Mr Thomas Pound’, a former courtier turned devout Catholic.* ²⁰

Since the 1570s the number of Catholics arrested for attending secret mass had increased steadily, so if you wished to meet an open and unrepentant papist there was always one place you were guaranteed to find one—prison. And though convicts were held at Her Majesty’s pleasure, the ever parsimonious Elizabeth did not consider them her guests. Prisoners were expected to supply their own food and drink and their own beds and bedding, the latter to be donated to the gaoler at the end of their sentence. Wealthy prisoners prepared to pay for the privilege might entertain visitors, conduct business and even go out from time to time, so long as sufficient amounts of money changed hands.

Thomas Pound was delighted to receive his new guest. He introduced Persons to a young man named Edward Brookesby who also happened to be visiting the prison that day and soon Persons was following Brookesby to a house on Fetter or Chancery Lane. The Jesuit’s luck had returned.²¹

Secrecy surrounded this house in the city. It was said to have belonged to Adam Squire, the Bishop of London’s son-in-law and London’s chief pursuivant, but by 1580 it had become the rented headquarters of a group of ‘young gentlemen of great zeal’, each one dedicated ‘to advance and assist the setting forward of God’s cause and religion…every man offering himself, his person, his ability, his friends, and whatsoever God had lent him besides, to the service of the cause’. This band of enthusiastic young Catholics (of which Edward Brooksby was one) was led by George Gilbert, a man already known to Robert Persons.²²

Gilbert was a twenty-eight-year-old Suffolk man of enormous independent wealth, an accomplished athlete, horseman and swordsman.* He had been raised a strict Puritan but in Paris, where he had proved a great favourite at the French court, he had come under the spell of Catholicism. From Paris he travelled to Rome where, with religious instruction from Robert Persons, his confessor at St Peter’s Basilica, Gilbert converted to the old faith. On his return to England in 1579 he began to gather about him a group of like-minded and equally wealthy young Englishmen, ready to devote their energies ‘to the common support of Catholics’. Charles Arundel, Charles Basset (a descendant of Sir Thomas More), Edward Habington, Edward and Francis Throckmorton, Anthony Babington, Henry Vaux, William Tresham and John Stonor: all would give time and money to further the Catholic cause; several would give their lives. To what degree they had already begun working together as a secret society is the subject of dispute, but with Robert Persons’ arrival in London their enthusiasm now found new focus.²³

Once settled in George Gilbert’s city headquarters, Persons began ‘to acquire a number of friends and to arrange with inns, with a view to staying in the country for a few days’. Then, with Gilbert’s aid and an escort to accompany him, Persons left London to ‘employ himself in the best manner he could to the comfort of Catholics’.²⁴

Meanwhile, in St Omer, Edmund Campion had received Persons’ letter and was preparing for his own crossing to England. On the evening of 24 June the summer storms that had battered the Channel coastline for days finally let up and the waiting was over. Disguised as Persons’ jewel merchant friend and with Ralph Emerson acting as his servant, Edmund Campion set sail from Calais.²⁵

At daybreak the following morning the port of Dover stood at red alert. Word had reached the Council that Gabriel Allen, William Allen’s brother, was returning to England to visit his family in Lancashire. Edmund Campion bore more than a passing resemblance to the wanted man. Campion and Emerson were dragged before the Mayor of Dover, cross-examined, then informed they were to be sent to London for further questioning. Then, for no obvious reason, the mayor changed his mind. Quickly, the two men left Dover, riding north to the Thames estuary before boarding a boat that took them upriver to the capital.²⁶

Reaching London, they were still in some doubt as to what they should do next. Then a man detached himself from the waiting crowd at the quayside and stepped forward to greet them, saying, ‘Mr Edmunds, give me your hand; I stay here for you to lead you to your friends.’ The man’s name was Thomas James. He was a member of George Gilbert’s brotherhood of young Catholics and for several days now he had been keeping watch for the two men’s arrival. By nightfall Campion and Emerson were safely installed at Gilbert’s headquarters.²⁷

On 6 April 1580, while Persons and General Mercurian discussed the details of their forthcoming mission and Campion hurried from Prague to Rome to join them, an earthquake hit London and the southern counties of England. ‘The great clock bell in the palace at Westminster strake of itself against the hammer with the shaking of the earth.’ Stones tumbled from St Paul’s Cathedral. In Newgate an apprentice was killed by falling church masonry. Meanwhile, at Sandwich in Kent the sea ‘foamed…so that the ships tottered’ and at Dover ‘a piece of the cliff fell into the sea’.²⁸

In the weeks and months that followed, strange visions appeared in the skies above Cornwall, Somerset and Wiltshire—ghostly castles and fleets of ships, three companies of men all dressed in black, a pack of hounds whose cry was so convincing it drew men from their houses in readiness for the chase. In Northumberland hailstones rained down in the shape of frogs, swords, crosses and, worse, the ‘skulls of dead men’. And in Yorkshire and Huntingdonshire strange births were reported, monstrous creatures part human, part beast, to signify ‘our monstrous life’, wrote Holinshed, who chronicled the year with a baleful gloom. The arrival of the Jesuits, like the arrival of the Spanish eight years later, was preceded by many ominous portents (not surprisingly, perhaps, when the prevailing view among William Allen’s circle was that ‘two Jesuits should do more than the whole army of Spain’).²⁹

And with the coming of these portents, the fear that had haunted the nation throughout the preceding decade grew stronger still. A future war with Catholic Europe now seemed a foregone conclusion. It was really only a matter of when and, specifically, with whom that war would be fought. Would it be with the Pope, who was already sending invasion forces to Ireland? With the Spanish, who seemed invincible? Or, closer to home still, with Scotland? In 1578 the pro-English and Protestant Regent to the Scottish throne, the Earl of Morton, had been forced to resign. Now the country was ruled jointly by the Earl of Arran and Esmé Stuart, the boy-king James VI’s favourite cousin, both of whom were pro-Catholic, pro-Mary and, worst of all, pro-French. Wherever you looked as an Englishman in 1580, to all points of the compass and to the very skies above your head, there were signs to trouble the bravest of souls. And set beside these general fears of imminent conflict was the more specific fear that while eyes and minds had been otherwise distracted England’s Catholics had been growing stronger.³⁰

At the close of the 1570s the Spanish ambassador reported home to Philip II that ‘The number of Catholics, thank God, is daily increasing here [in England], owing to the college and seminary for Englishmen which your Majesty ordered to be supported in Douai.’ If this was designed to flatter, soon there were other reports flying backwards and forwards supporting the ambassador’s claim. Henry Shaw, one of Allen’s four proto-missionaries, wrote back to his mentor, ‘The number of Catholics increases so abundantly on all sides, that he who almost alone holds the rudder of state [Sir William Cecil?] had privately admitted to one of his friends that for one staunch Catholic at the beginning of the reign there were now, he knew for certain, ten.’ From Warwickshire the Earl of Leicester wrote to Sir William Cecil in alarm, to ‘assure your Lordship, since Queen Mary’s time, the Papists were never in that jollity they be at this present time in the country’. Meanwhile, the new Bishop of London, John Aylmer, warned Sir Francis Walsingham ‘that the Papists do marvellously increase, both in number and in obstinate withdrawing of themselves from the Church and service of God’.* A nationwide census of convicted recusants, drawn up in 1577, offered the shocking proof that there was not a diocese in England that did not contain a number of Catholics steadfastly refusing to attend the Anglican Church. And for every Catholic who openly defied the law, it was believed there were many more still who publicly conformed to the 1559 Settlement while attending Roman mass in secret.³¹

It is difficult to know what to make of these reports. Offered in isolation, without other annual figures against which to compare them, there is little way of telling whether the Government’s 1577 findings show there to have been a significant growth in Catholic numbers, a change in Catholic behaviour (thanks to the influence of Allen’s missionaries), or simply (and most likely) an invigoration of the investigative process by which Catholics were being identified. Add to the mix a measure of Protestant paranoia and Catholic pride and it becomes still harder to get at the facts. But as the new decade dawned the widely held perception was that the number of practising—and thereby dissenting and potentially treacherous—Catholics had increased substantially. Here was a threat more specific and far closer to home than the potential invasion forces of Rome or Spain. And now, too, that threat could be personified. It had a name: a traitor and a turncoat’s name, the name of a former royal favourite and a courtier’s protégé, of the one-time ablest man in Oxford. As Privy Councillor Sir Walter Mildmay later testified in the Star Chamber, of all the ‘rabble of runagate friars’ there was ‘one above the rest notorious for impudency and audacity, named Campion’.³²

News of Edmund Campion’s arrival spread quickly through the Catholic community, the buzz that had surrounded his name up at Oxford undiminished by his many years abroad. On 29 June at the Feast of St Peter and St Paul, just three days after his appearance in London, a huge audience assembled at the Smithfield house of Lord Norris, hired for the occasion by Lord Paget, to hear him speak.* As a precaution, gentlemen ‘of worship and honour’, members of George Gilbert’s association, were set to guard the doors of the house against intruders, but no guard could halt the whispers now rippling through the busy London streets. It was not long before those same whispers had reached the ears of the Government’s informers.³³

Soon spies were at work across the capital, detailed to ‘sigh after Catholic sermons and to show great devotion and desire of the same, especially if any of the Jesuits might be heard’. When Robert Persons returned from his preliminary tour of the country in early July he found Campion ‘retired for his more safety’ to Southwark and the situation a grave one, the searches ‘so eager and frequent…and the spies so many and diligent’. Clearly for Campion to remain longer in London was courting danger.³⁴

But first the two priests had another problem to address, for it was not just the English Government that harboured suspicions about the Jesuits’ intentions. Some of England’s Catholics, too, though desirous to hear Campion and Persons preach, were less than happy to welcome the pair home for a prolonged stay. At a secret conference held in Southwark, near St Mary Overies (now Southwark Cathedral), Persons and Campion met with a panel of leading Catholic laymen and priests. Persons opened the meeting. He declared under oath that neither he nor Campion had been forewarned of the Pope’s Irish invasion—they had learned of the expedition only at Reims. Next, he read out the instructions for their mission, emphasizing that their orders strictly prohibited them from dabbling in ‘matters of state’. But his protestations failed to convince one of the attending priests, who now argued that the Catholics to whom he had spoken feared the Jesuits’ mission could only ever be viewed as political by the English Government. For the good of the faith, therefore, the pair should leave the country at once. Persons refused. The Jesuits had been expressly called to the mission. If they turned back now it would represent a decisive propaganda victory for Elizabeth and her Council. His argument won the day, but in the decades to come this conflict would become a full-scale and enervating war of attrition between the rival Catholic factions.³⁵

The conference broke up not a moment too soon. Government agents were closing in on the venue. Charles Sledd, a former student at Rome who had found it profitable on his return to England to turn Protestant informer, recognized a face familiar from his college days—that of law student and known Catholic, Henry Orton, Persons’ guide on his earlier tour of the country, now travelling to Southwark to take part in the secret meeting. Sledd fell into step behind him, but before Orton could reach his destination Sledd had him apprehended. When, just a short while later, Sledd spotted the elderly Marian priest Robert Johnson making the same journey to Southwark, the informer’s suspicions were aroused. Once again Campion and Persons had a lucky escape. Sledd’s constable, growing impatient of the hunt, broke cover too soon and arrested Johnson some distance short of the meeting house. The time had come for the two Jesuits to leave London for the comparative safety of the open road.³⁶

Each equipped with a pair of horses, a servant, travelling clothes suitable for a gentleman and sixty pounds of spending money—all provided by George Gilbert, who accompanied them on the first leg of their journey—Campion and Persons headed north out of the city to Hoxton, where they spent the night, possibly at the house of Sir William Catesby, a landowner with Catholic sympathies. The following morning they were surprised by Thomas Pound, who had successfully bribed his way out of the Marshalsea prison and had ridden through the night to intercept them. The prisoners had been talking among themselves, said Pound. If Campion or Persons were captured it would be an easy matter for the Government to paint them as traitors and political agitators. They must each, therefore, set down a declaration of their aims and the precise purpose of their mission, which Pound would safeguard for them. It seemed a sensible idea and the two Jesuits duly wrote out their statements, handing them to the waiting Pound before heading on their way. Persons sealed his paper; Campion left his open: a small character distinction that would have huge repercussions.³⁷

Back in the Marshalsea, Pound read Campion’s document. He showed it to his fellow prisoners. Soon, copies of the text were circulating through the gaol, smuggled from cell to cell. Visitors to the prison carried transcripts away with them. The pages fanned out across London and to the countryside beyond, landing indiscriminately in the hands of friend and foe. Campion’s testimony, intended as a defence of his case only in the event of his arrest, was now blowing through England like a campaign manifesto.³⁸

Campion addressed the Privy Council directly and in measured tones at first. His return home to his ‘dear Country’ was ‘for the glory of God and the benefit of souls’. He was ‘strictly forbidden by our Father that sent me, to deal in any respect with matter of State or Policy of this realm’. He begged for a chance to defend the Catholic faith before the Privy Council and an assembly of judges and theologians, so certain was he that no one could fail to be persuaded of the rightness of his argument if they would only give him an ‘indifferent and quiet audience’. But then, in a flourish of rhetoric familiar from his Oxford days, Campion laid down a challenge that horrified his Protestant readers: ‘be it known to you that we have made a league—all the Jesuits in the world…—cheerfully to carry the cross you shall lay upon us, and never to despair your recovery, while we have a man left to enjoy your Tyburn’. Even now, gathered beyond the seas, were ‘many innocent hands’, all of whom were ‘determined never to give you over, but either to win you to heaven, or to die upon your pikes’. To Catholics it was a blast of hope. To Protestants, and to Elizabeth’s Government in particular, it was a war cry. If Campion had been a wanted man before, now he had become the official spokesman of the Catholic mission and a voice to be silenced at all costs.³⁹

The immediate aim of the Jesuits’ mission, highlighted by the awkward few hours spent by Persons on his arrival searching for a Catholic contact to aid him, was to bring order to the local efforts of Allen’s seminary missionaries. Successful the seminary priests had undoubtedly been, but their successes were isolated. What was required was a coherent, national scheme, providing a country-wide network of priests capable of administering to all England’s Catholics. Secondary to this aim was the need to ensure a regular supply of students to the Reims and Rome seminaries. This latter objective could be dealt with straightforwardly. It was arranged for a Father William Hartley and a Father Arthur Pitts to take up discreet residence at Oxford and Cambridge respectively, to search out and approach likely recruits for the mission. Hartley’s job was the easier—Oxford students were still proving highly ‘responsive to the ancient faith’, even by 1580.* Pitts, though, had his work cut out for him. Cambridge’s proximity to the trading routes of the East Coast, along which Protestant theories had first flooded into England, meant that the country’s second university was never as defiantly pro-Catholic as the more isolated Oxford. Nevertheless, a number of students were still eager to listen to Pitts’ arguments and ‘within a few months he gained a harvest of seven young men of very great promise and talent, and now they are on the point of being sent to the Seminary at Rheims’, reported Persons afterwards. More would soon follow.* ⁴⁰

But to achieve their primary objective Campion and Persons needed to travel—to divide up the country between them and cover it, county by county. Their first tour of duty lasted three months, with Persons taking in Gloucester, Hereford, Worcester and on through to Derbyshire, and Campion visiting Berkshire, Oxfordshire and Northamptonshire. A second round of journeying found Persons moving in and about the London area, and Campion going north for six months, up to Lancashire and Yorkshire.⁴¹

With the travelling, though, came all the pressures of isolation and nervous exhaustion that General Everard Mercurian had warned them of back in Rome. ‘I cannot long escape the hands of the heretics,’ wrote Campion; ‘the enemy have so many eyes, so many tongues, so many scouts and crafts.’ He was forced to switch disguises continuously to keep ahead of the pursuivants, but still this offered him little sense of security: ‘My soul is in mine own hands ever.’ And as fast as the pursuivants chased him so the rumour mills turned: ‘I read letters sometimes myself that in the first front tell news that Campion is taken, which, noised in every place where I come, so filleth my ears with the sound thereof, that fear itself hath taken away all fear.’ Persons wrote simply: ‘We never have a single day free from danger.’⁴²

As the manhunt intensified so too did the means used to flush the two Jesuits from their hiding places. Campion informed Mercurian ‘at the very writing hereof, the persecution rages most cruelly. The house where I am is sad; no other talk but of death, flight, prison, or spoil of their friends’. Persons wrote: ‘the violence …is most intense and it is of a kind that has not been heard of since the conversion of England. Everywhere there are being dragged to prison, noblemen and those of humble birth, men, women and even children’. He described sitting at table when ‘there comes a hurried knock at the door, like that of a pursuivant; all start up and listen,—like deer when they hear the huntsmen; we leave our food and commend ourselves to God…If it is nothing, we laugh at our fright’. Too often, though, it proved not to be nothing. Ralph Sherwin, a young seminarian and former Oxford student who had accompanied the two Jesuits on their journey from Rome, was arrested on 13 November, preaching at the house of Mr Roscarock just twenty-four hours after he had been with Persons. Edward Rishton, another former Oxford undergraduate and one of the first English students at Allen’s Douai seminary, was captured during a raid at the Red Rose Tavern in Holborn. Persons was expected at the inn, but he had lost his way en route and only arrived when the search was over.⁴³

On 16 January 1581 Parliament met to consider the Jesuit peril. Unsurprisingly, Sir Walter Mildmay’s opening speech was full of invective against the newly arrived priests in particular and the Catholic population in general. The Jesuits crept ‘into the houses and familiarities of men of behaviour and reputation…to corrupt the realm with false doctrine’, and ‘to stir sedition’. Meanwhile, ‘the obstinate and stiff-necked Papist is far from being reformed as he hath gotten stomach to go backwards’.⁴⁴

Invective alone could never be enough, though, and for the next few months both Houses debated how best to counter the perceived threat. As so often before, Elizabeth acted as a restraining influence on her ministers and the legislation finally passed that session, entitled an ‘Act to retain the Queen’s Majesty’s subject in their due obedience’, was far milder than had at first seemed likely. It declared it treason to withdraw Elizabeth’s subjects ‘from their natural obedience’ to her, or to convert them ‘for that intent to the Romish religion’. All those who willingly allowed themselves to be converted would also be adjudged traitors.⁴⁵

It was the wording ‘for that intent’ that was significant here. It represented an attempt to wrest the problem of English Catholicism away from the religious, back towards the political, ground on which the Government knew itself to have surer footing. For the act failed plainly to define conversion to Catholicism as treason. Rather, it suggested, it was the withdrawal of allegiance to the Queen that such a conversion, by necessity, implied that was the real crime. Even as Campion and Persons declared their aim to be purely spiritual, Parliament was further enshrining opposition to the official English Church as a political act. Here was an argument that would run and run, but more immediately the new Treason Act and the anti-Jesuit vitriol that accompanied it merely served to reinvigorate the pursuivants trailing Campion and Persons. The hunt was closing in.

On Tuesday, 11 July Campion bade farewell to Persons and set off from their safe house at Stonor in Oxfordshire on yet another round of travelling. He was scheduled to go east into Norfolk, a county as yet unvisited by the Jesuits, calling first at Houghton Hall in Lancashire to collect some papers he had left there. It was a roundabout route but by now the pair had begun to build up a network of safe houses between London and Lancashire where he could stagger his journey. First, though, he had a favour to ask of Persons. For some time now he had been begged by the owners of Lyford Grange near Wantage, the Yate family, to come and stay with them. As the Yates were known to be defiantly Catholic—Mr Yate was then a prisoner in London for recusancy, while his mother supported a community of two priests and eight nuns at the house—he had always felt it unwise to call there before. Now, though, he was passing close by Wantage. Would Persons give him permission to stay at Lyford? He would not preach. Nor would he call attention to himself. And he would leave immediately the following morning. On these terms Persons agreed to his request.⁴⁶

The visit went according to plan and early the next day Campion was on the road again, heading towards Oxford. But back at Lyford the house was alive with whispers, the familiar little currents that sucked and eddied around Campion wherever he went. Visiting Catholic neighbours were dismayed to learn that they had missed the famous Campion; they were more dismayed still to learn that he had not even preached; he must be made to return to them at once, and a rider was dispatched to deliver this request. Campion was intercepted at an inn outside Oxford, talking with a group of students who had journeyed out from the university to meet him. As soon as the rider had passed on his message, the students’ voices rose up in unison: Campion must go back to Lyford and speak. The lay brother Ralph Emerson could ride on to Lancashire and collect his papers; indeed it would be safer that way, for hadn’t Persons been worried about Campion revisiting Houghton, and surely he and Emerson could arrange a rendezvous point in Norfolk? The two Jesuits were no match for this barrage and Campion was borne triumphantly back to Lyford Grange.⁴⁷

The next couple of days passed peacefully. Campion was introduced to a steady flow of Oxford students and local Catholics all eager to meet him. Word filtered quickly through the district that Campion was staying with the Yates. On the morning of Sunday, 16 July a Mr George Eliot arrived at Lyford. Eliot had served in a number of Catholic households across southern England and he was an old friend of the Yates’ cook, Thomas Cooper. He was also, it was said, a convicted rapist and murderer who had bargained his way out of gaol by turning informant. If this was true, it was known to very few, and soon Cooper whispered to Eliot that a secret mass was about to begin. Eliot’s companion, David Jenkins, who was not a Catholic (though he was, said Eliot, sympathetic to the faith), was left drinking beer in the buttery and Eliot, himself, was ushered through to a ‘fair, large chamber’ beyond, where Campion was preaching. Immediately the service ended Eliot and Jenkins, along with several others who had attended the celebration, rode away, leaving Campion to dine with members of the household and those few stalwarts who had stayed on to talk with him. At one o’clock the house was surrounded by a company of soldiers. At their head was the neighbouring magistrate, Mr Fettiplace. Beside him rode George Eliot and David Jenkins.⁴⁸

The pursuivants were held at the gate while Campion was hidden away. Then the doors were opened and the soldiers began their search for him. In the hours that followed they discovered ‘many secret corners’ but no sign of Campion. Mr Fettiplace grew apologetic at the inconvenience he was causing his neighbours; George Eliot grew more resolute—now he and Jenkins took charge of the search. That night a guard was set about the house and next day the hunt resumed.⁴⁹

It was chance that finally led to Campion’s discovery. As the despondent pursuivants made to leave after a fruitless morning’s search, by now ‘clear void of any hope’, Jenkins ‘espied a chink in the wall of boards’ over the stairwell, ‘which he quickly found to be hollow’. Seizing a crowbar he broke through to a small chamber beyond, where Campion and two other priests lay concealed.* ⁵⁰

It was chance, too, that had led Eliot to Lyford in the first place. He was, he later admitted, on the trail of the seminary priest John Payne.† When he saw a servant keeping watch on the roof of Lyford he had simply decided to investigate further. With two such simple instances of chance the Jesuit mission lay in ruins.⁵¹

Campion was led up to London under armed escort. With him were Fathers Ford and Collington, the two Lyford priests discovered with him in the hiding place, nine laymen, accused of aiding and abetting him and attending his forbidden mass, and the luckless Father William Filby, who had arrived at Lyford in secret only to find the place overrun with pursuivants and the magistrates in possession. At Henley, where the party spent the first night, Robert Persons, now in hiding at nearby Stonor, was able to send a servant to see how the captives were being treated. The servant reported back that Campion appeared in good spirits and was on friendly terms with his guards. It was George Eliot who was treated with disdain by soldiers and magistrates alike. Members of the watching crowds were even bold enough to shout out ‘Judas’ at the informer as he passed by.⁵²

As the party neared London, though, the procession took on a different aspect. At the Council’s request the prisoners were pinioned in their saddles, their arms strapped tightly behind them and their legs bound together by a rope slung beneath the belly of their mount. Campion, himself, rode at the front of the cavalcade, a sign about his head reading ‘Edmund Campion the Seditious Jesuit’. In this fashion they passed through the streets of London to the Tower.⁵³

The trial of Edmund Campion took place on 20 November 1581, four months after his arrest and imprisonment. The charges laid against him, and those arraigned with him, were that on specific dates in Rome and in Reims the previous year, Edmund Campion, Robert Persons, William Allen, the layman Henry Orton and the entire haul of priests then in custody, including Ralph Sherwin, Edward Rishton, Robert Johnson, the Lyford priests, Thomas Ford and John Collington, and William Filby, had conspired to murder Queen Elizabeth. Further to this they had been privy to foreign invasion plans—they, themselves, were the advance party for that invasion, sent to stir up rebellion. It is unclear why the original indictment, which invoked Parliament’s new Treason Act, was dropped in favour of these accusations. Perhaps Elizabeth’s reluctance to make martyrs had something to do with it—political enemies of England deserved execution, but so many priests dying solely for their faith smacked strongly of religious persecution for its own sake. More likely, though, it was a calculated attempt by the Government to turn what might have become an intellectual argument about the lawfulness of the Anglican Church—in which Campion might have triumphed—into an emotive debate about national security. Either way, the Council dropped what would have been a legal, if unpopular, arraignment on the grounds of converting the Queen’s subjects to Catholicism, in favour of these trumped-up charges of mass conspiracy to murder.* It was entirely in keeping with the paranoia of the age.⁵⁴

Also in keeping was the procession of shady characters brought out to testify against the accused. The informant Charles Sledd swore that while in Rome and in Reims he had learned of the invasion plans from William Allen and one of the prisoners, Luke Kirby. George Eliot claimed that Campion, in his Lyford sermon, had spoken of ‘a great day’ that was soon to come, and that another of the prisoners had sworn him to secrecy about the plot. And the arch-fabricator Anthony Munday was brought in to announce to a packed courtroom that the English seminary students were schooled in treason, that Henry Orton had told him at Lyons that Elizabeth was not the rightful Queen of England—Orton vehemently denied ever having set eyes on Munday before—and that Edward Rishton was a skilled maker of fireworks who was planning to burn Elizabeth in her royal barge with ‘a confection of wild fire’, an event to be followed by a general massacre of all those not in possession of the password ‘Jesus Maria’.† The verdict was a foregone conclusion.⁵⁵

Campion had always believed he was coming home to England to die. The night before his departure from Prague a colleague had inscribed on the door above his cell P. Edmundus Campianus, Martyr. Earlier, another priest had painted a garland of roses and lilies on the wall above his bed—the symbol of martyrdom. On the morning of 1 December 1581 Campion was led out from the Tower, through the driving rain and the mud-choked London streets, to the scaffold at Tyburn. There he was hanged, drawn and quartered before the assembled crowds. With him were Father Alexander Briant, a close friend of Robert Persons, and Father Ralph Sherwin, the young seminarian who had set off from Rome with Campion and Persons in such high spirits the year before.⁵⁶

In May the following year seven more priests were executed, including Thomas Ford, Luke Kirby, Robert Johnson and William Filby. Edward Rishton and the layman Henry Orton, though both found guilty of treason and sentenced to death, were not executed. They were kept prisoner in the Tower until January 1585 when they were forcibly deported to France. Father John Collington was able to find a witness to confirm he had been resident in England since July 1576 and therefore could not have been in Reims and Rome on the dates specified. Like Orton and Rishton he was exiled to France in January 1585, having spent the intervening years in the comparative comfort of the Marshalsea prison.

After Campion’s execution the lay brother Ralph Emerson escaped from England and made his way safely to Rouen. He joined in exile George Gilbert, the Jesuits’ friend, guide and self-appointed financier, whose activities had placed him in grave danger of arrest and who had been persuaded to leave England shortly before Campion’s capture. As for Robert Persons, with Campion’s arrest the Government now turned its attention wholly on him. Clearly, he could not elude the pursuivants for long and in August he made his way to France, disguised as one of a number of Catholic refugees fleeing persecution. He would never see England again.⁵⁷

The savagery of Campion’s death had taken people’s breath away. It was not just that he had been tortured while in the Tower—so severe were the bouts of racking he endured that when his keeper asked him how he felt, he allegedly answered ‘Not ill, because not at all’; witnesses to his trial reported he was unable to raise his hand to take the oath and witnesses to his execution reported ‘that all his nails had been dragged out’. It was not just that so many had been executed with him—since Cuthbert Mayne’s execution in 1577, only two other priests and one scholar had suffered the same fate. It was more the realization that the Government had turned against one of its own, and such a one as the scholar Campion, that shocked onlookers.⁵⁸

Some felt Elizabeth had sacrificed Campion as a sop to those Puritans concerned by her proposal to wed the Catholic Duc d’Alençon. Others, that Campion had been silenced by a Government unable to defend its new faith against the theological reasoning of the Catholic Church. Ballad-mongers were soon singing:

If instead of good argument,

We deal by the rack,

The Papists may think

That learning we lack.

Many were even more direct in their criticisms:

Our preachers have preached in pastime and pleasure,

And now they be hated far passing all measure;

Their wives and their wealth have made them so mute,

They cannot nor dare not with Campion dispute.

What was clear to all, though, was that with Campion’s death, the Jesuit mission to England had been stopped in its tracks. The question was, could it ever regain its momentum?⁵⁹

Seven years later, in October 1588, Father John Gerard was setting out to answer this question. Campion had written of a ‘league’ of ‘all the Jesuits in the world’—a league dedicated to restoring England to the Catholic Church, no matter how brutal the cost. For Gerard the time had come to make good that promise.

* Campion is reported to have asked for nothing but Leicester’s friendship.

* Campion chose to walk from Douai to Rome as a poor pilgrim. On the way he was met by an Oxford contemporary who at first failed to recognize him and then assumed he had been robbed. When he learned it was voluntary mortification he dismissed the idea as un-English and fit only for a crazed fanatic, and he offered Campion a share of his purse. Campion refused.

* Ignatius Loyola died in 1556.

* Gregory’s attitude towards Elizabeth is controversial. In 1580 his Secretary of State gave the following answer to an enquiry by a group of English noblemen as to whether or not they would incur sin by assassinating the Queen: ‘Since that guilty woman of England rules over two such noble kingdoms of Christendom and is the cause of so much injury to the Catholic faith, and loss of so many million souls, there is no doubt that whosoever sends her out of the world with the pious intention of doing service, not only does not sin but gains merit’. This judgement came with Gregory’s approval. The logic behind it was clear: Elizabeth was a heretic; her actions imperilled the souls of her subjects; her killing was expedient (to cite ‘thou shalt not kill’ in objection ignores the fact that the Church was already busy burning heretics). But to extrapolate from this that the Vatican officially sanctioned the murder of its opponents is wide of the mark; indeed, Gregory’s approval of the English noblemen’s scheme had a hugger-mugger air to it, admission that Elizabeth’s assassination was against the spirit, if not the letter, of contemporary moral reasoning. Of course, the net result of his dubious opinion was a propaganda coup for the Protestants.

† Goldwell’s correspondence with the Pope took several months, by which time plague had broken out in Reims and he had grown desperate. One of his letters, dated 13 July 1580, began, ‘Beatissimo Padre,—If I could have crossed over into England before my coming was known there, as I hoped to do, I think that my going thither would have been a comfort to the Catholics, and a satisfaction to your Holiness; wherein now I fear the contrary, for there are so many spies in this kingdom, and my long tarrying here had made my going to England so bruited there, that now I doubt it will be difficult for me to enter that kingdom without some danger.’ In the end he dismissed himself without permission and returned to Rome to a chilly reception.

* William Cecil, desperate to avoid provoking Spain further, had done his best to scupper Drake’s adventure. He is even said to have placed one of his own agents among the crew to incite a mutiny. The agent was discovered and hanged from the yardarm.

† The old King of Portugal died in January 1580 without a direct heir and as the son of the dead King’s eldest sister, Philip was quick to press home his claim to the title.

* The story of Pound’s transformation from wealthy courtier to religious prisoner is remarkable (though quite possibly apocryphal). He is said to have performed a complicated pas seul before the Queen, who was so impressed she called on him to repeat the move. Pound did so, but this time he fell. To the ringing laughter of the Queen and her court he retired, with the words ‘Sic transit gloria mundi’, and from then on he devoted himself to religion.

* An informer’s report, dated 26 December 1580, describes Gilbert as ‘bending somewhat in the knees, fair-complexioned, reasonably well-coloured, little hair on his face, and short if he have any, thick somewhat of speech, and about twenty-four years of age’. By this stage Gilbert was a wanted man.

* Walsingham was Elizabeth’s new Principal Secretary of State since Sir William Cecil’s appointment as Lord Treasurer in 1573. Cecil was also created Baron Burghley, in recognition of his service to Elizabeth.

* Henry Norris was a favourite of Elizabeth’s—his father had been executed on a manufactured charge of adultery with Elizabeth’s mother, Anne Boleyn (thus sealing Anne’s downfall), and the family had forfeited their lands. At her succession Elizabeth restored those lands and later ennobled Norris. Thomas Paget was a staunch Catholic who endured frequent terms of imprisonment for his faith.

* On 16 March 1583 William Allen observed: ‘Great complaints are made to the Queen’s councillors about the university of Oxford, because of the number who from time to time leave their colleges and are supposed to pass over to us.’

* Both Hartley and Pitts were eventually caught by the authorities. They were banished from England in 1585. Hartley returned soon afterwards and was recaptured. He was executed at Shoreditch in London on 5 October 1588, one of the many Catholics executed in the aftermath of the Armada.

* During restoration works at Lyford in 1959 an Agnus Dei blessed by Pope Gregory XIII and papers dated 1579 were found in a wooden box nailed to a joist under the attic floorboards.

† John Payne was Cuthbert Mayne’s travelling companion to England in 1576. He was eventually captured and executed at Chelmsford, Essex on 4 April 1582.

* No doubt many of the Council believed in Campion, Persons and Allen’s guilt but both Ford and Collington had been in England a number of years before the Jesuits’ arrival, while poor Filby had only bad timing to thank for his presence at Lyford.

† Quick to jump onto the bandwagon, Munday published an account of Campion’s capture within a couple of days of the Jesuit’s imprisonment. Eliot later complained that the book was ‘as contrary to truth as an egg is contrary to the likeness of an oyster’.