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

To Nicholas Fordham

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Epilogue

Author’s Note

Appendix

Endnotes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

One

‘…as the waves of the sea, without stay, do one rise and overtake another,

so the Pope and his…ministers be never at rest, but as fast as one

enterprise faileth they take another in hand…hoping at last to prevail.’

Sir Walter Mildmay MP, October 1586

ARMADA YEAR, 1588, swept in on a flood tide of historical prophecies and dire predictions. For the numerologists, who divided the Christian calendar into vast, looping cycles of time, constructed in multiples of seven and ten and based on the Revelation of St John and the bloodier parts of the Book of Isaiah, the year offered nothing less than the opening of the Seventh Seal, the overthrow of Antichrist and the sounding of the trumpets for the Last Judgement.1

For the fifteenth century mathematician Regiomontanus, although he had not been quite so specific about the year’s unfolding, still the promise of a solar eclipse in February, and not one but two lunar eclipses in March and August had not, he had thought, augured well.* Regiomontanus had recorded his findings in Latin verse, concluding: ‘If, this year, total catastrophe does not befall, if land and sea do not collapse in total ruin, yet will the whole world suffer in upheavals, empires will dwindle and from everywhere will be great lamentation.’ As the year began, in Prague the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, himself a keen astrologer, scanned the heavens for signs that his was not the empire to which Regiomontanus referred. He could discover little more than that the weather that year would be unseasonably bad.2

The printers of Amsterdam rang in the year with a special edition of their annual almanac, detailing in lurid prose the coming disasters: tempests and floods, midsummer snowstorms, darkness at midday, rain clouds of blood, monstrous births, and strange convulsions of the earth. On a more positive note, they suggested that things would calm down a bit after August and that late autumn might even be lucky for some, but this was not a January horoscope many read with pleasure.

In Spain and Portugal the sailors assembling along the western seaboard talked of little else, no matter that their King, His Most Catholic Majesty Philip II of Spain, regarded all attempts to divine the future as impious. In Lisbon a fortune-teller was arrested for ‘making false and discouraging predictions’, but the arrest came too late: the year had already begun with a flurry of naval desertions. In the Basque ports Philip’s recruiting drive slowed and halted ‘because of many strange and frightening portents that are rumoured’.3

In Rome it was brought to the attention of Pope Sixtus V that a recent earth tremor in England had just disgorged an ancient marble slab, concealed for centuries beneath the crypt of Glastonbury Abbey, on which were written in letters of fire the opening words of Regiomontanus’ prediction. It was felt by the papal agent who delivered this report that the mathematician could not, therefore, be the original author of the verses and that the prophecy could stem from one source only: from the magician Merlin. It was the first hint that God might be on the side of the English.4

But in England no one mentioned Merlin’s intervention in international affairs and the English almanacs that year were strangely muted affairs, proffering the general observation that ‘Here and in the quarters following might be noted…many strange events to happen which purposely are omitted in good consideration.’ With their fellow printers in Amsterdam working round the clock to meet the public’s demand for gruesome predictions, it seems odd the English press were grown so coy, particularly when the editor of Holinshed’s Chronicles had written the year before that Regiomontanus’ prophecy was ‘rife in every man’s mouth’. But it was not in the Government’s interest that England should be flooded with stories of death and destruction, for it was all too likely that any day now it would be visited by the real thing.* 5

For some four years now England and Spain had been at war: an undeclared phoney war, fought at third hand, on the battlefields of the Low Countries and up and down the Spanish Main, by mercenaries and privateers, most notably the ‘merry, careful’ Francis Drake. Drake’s raid on the port of Cadiz in April 1587 had cost Spain some thirty ships and had bought England a twelvemonth reprieve. But all this did was to postpone the inevitable until the fateful year 1588, because the Spanish were coming, with the mightiest fleet that had ever been amassed. Tall-sided galleons like floating castles, many-oared galleys, cargo-carrying urcas, nimble pataches and zabras, all these had been assembling in the west-coast ports of the Iberian peninsula since 1586. Together they could hold some thirty thousand men, numerous cavalry horses and pack animals and all the many carefully counted barrels of food and water needed to sustain a force of such size. The normally tight-fisted Pope Sixtus—‘When it comes to getting money out of him, it is like squeezing his life blood,’ wrote the Spanish ambassador Olivares to King Philip—had swallowed his respect for the English Queen, Elizabeth I, and signed a treaty with Spain, promising a million gold ducats (about £250,000) to Philip should he manage to conquer England, so long as the next English ruler, a position on which Philip had designs himself, returned the country to Catholicism.* The Duke of Parma, commander-in-chief of the Spanish Netherlands, was only waiting for the signal to embark his army in a flotilla of flat-bottomed landing-craft, cross the English Channel and sail his forces up the Thames estuary. And all across Europe, rulers and ruled alike stopped what they were doing to watch and wait for the outcome to this clash between the forces of good and evil. This was ideological warfare of a type never before fought in Europe, transcending national boundaries and old-fashioned disputes about landownership. And while the opposing ideologies were, inevitably, somewhat tarnished by political and personal self-interest, nonetheless, in its purest distillation, this war was billed as the deciding round in the conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism, the final answer to a question that had paralysed sixteenth-century Christian Europe, the question of what you could and could not believe. Though few could afford to be combatants, no one could afford to be neutral. But the result, it seemed, was a foregone conclusion.6

Ranged against England were the combined forces of Spain, Portugal, the Italian States, and the Spanish Netherlands, with France, though as yet undecided, also likely to join the Catholic crusade. The English troops, in comparison with Spain’s professional, battle-hardened soldiers, were an ill-trained rabble of amateur militiamen, drafted into service at county-wide musters and required to pay for their own gunpowder for the duration of combat. The officers were no better. Most refused to take orders from anyone lower in social standing than themselves. Had it not been for the remodelling of the Queen’s Navy by Drake’s fellow sea-dog, John Hawkins, the outcome of the Armada conflict might well have been very different. Still, Hawkins’s core fleet of twenty-three warships and eighteen smaller pinnaces was heavily outnumbered by the sixty-five galleons that formed the heart of the Spanish Navy. And his belief that the success of Elizabeth’s ships lay in long-range gunnery rather than traditional short-range grappling was not helped by those English gunmakers still busily selling cannons to the Spanish as late as 1587.7

So at the beginning of 1588 the odds on the Deity being a Spaniard were temptingly short. ‘Pray to God’, wrote one member of the Armada force, ‘that in England he doth give me a house of some very rich merchant, where I may place my ensign.’ Indeed, for all those about to embark with the Armada, England was a place of lucrative spoils and members of the fleet were delighted by how easy it was to obtain credit on the eve of sailing. Many spent their money on fine clothes for the occasion and one returning Englishman reported that ‘the soldiers and gentlemen that come on this voyage are very richly appointed’. If the hard-headed bankers of Europe were putting their money on an easy victory for Spain, it was small wonder that in December 1587 a false rumour that the Spanish were coming sent the population of England’s coastal towns flying inland for protection.8

As May 1588 gave way to a blustery June, a cargo ship under Captain Hans Limburger made its way slowly north from Cadiz, bound for the Hanseatic port of Hamburg. At Cape Espichel, just south of Lisbon, Limburger saw a sight that stunned him. Although Spain’s preparations were no secret to anyone in Europe, nothing had prepared the German captain for this. For one whole day Limburger’s ship beat slowly past the assembled Spanish fleet, ‘the ocean groaning under the weight of them’. At Plymouth Limburger was able to give the port authorities the confirmation they needed: the Armada was under sail and on its way.9

Now, after many months of uncertainty, the orders were finally given for all army officers to remain on call and for all troops to be ready to move at an hour’s notice. The better-trained soldiers were positioned near the most likely landing sites, to attack the invasion force while it was disembarking and at its most vulnerable. Barriers of logs and chains were brought in to seal off main roads and all routes into towns and cities. Militia groups were instructed in the scorched-earth policy they were to employ should the Spanish once get a foothold on land. Strategic points such as bridges and fording places were put under guard and instructions were given that in the coastal towns and villages no one was allowed to leave once the warning beacons had been lit, under pain of death. Then the nation waited.10

For now the bad weather Emperor Rudolf had seen written in the night skies and that had blown and sobbed its way through Europe for the better part of the year began to play its part in the conflict, breathing new life into the spectres of Regiomontanus’ prophecy. By the end of June the Spanish fleet was still holed up in the port of Corunna as storms swept the Iberian coastline. A month later it was the English Navy’s turn to suffer the high winds and heavy seas as it carried out its daily patrol of the western reaches of the English Channel. ‘I know not what weather you have had there,’ wrote Admiral Lord Howard of Effingham, commander of the fleet, to Sir Francis Walsingham, Principal Secretary of State, at court, ‘but there never was any such summer seen here on the sea.’ With the waiting came the whispering. ‘There has been a rumour at Court, which has spread all over London,’ reported Philip II’s eyes and ears in the English capital, ‘that the Spaniards have orders from their King to slaughter all English people, men and women, over the age of seven years.’11

Finally on Friday, 29 July the Armada was sighted off the Cornish coastline, and for Howard, Hawkins, and Drake, and the men of the English Navy, battle commenced. Throughout the following week, between contrary winds and dead calms, the smaller, more mobile English vessels harried their larger, cumbersome Spanish counterparts the length of the Channel, trying at every turn to disrupt the tightly packed crescent formation adopted by the Armada fleet. Shrouded in a heavy pall of gunsmoke it was hard enough for those in the thick of each encounter to know what was going on about them, but for those onshore and far inland the desperate clawing into wind to gain the advantage, the agonizing and hypnotic slowness of the combatants closing on each other, the silence broken by the roar of gunfire, was all a distant, disconnected dream. In mainland Europe rumour had the Armada safely landed in a defeated, humbled England, with a captive Queen Elizabeth on her way to Rome, to appear, barefoot and penitent, before Pope Sixtus. In England they kept on waiting.12

On Saturday, 6 August at 5 p.m. the Spanish fleet dropped anchor off Calais to make contact with the Duke of Parma. About midnight on the following day the tide turned, bringing with it, blazing out of the darkness, English fireships, packed with explosives, and in panic the Spaniards cut their cables and fled. The last chapter in the Armada’s story had begun. ‘From this piece of industry,’ wrote one Spanish officer, ‘they dislodged us with eight vessels, an exploit which with [our] one hundred and thirty they had not been able to do nor dared to attempt.’ What the fireships started, the storm-force winds now continued, sweeping the scattered Spanish fleet first towards the shoals of the Zeeland banks and then helplessly northwards up the English coast. For another Spanish officer this had become ‘the most fearful day in the world’. The Duke of Medina Sidonia, the Armada’s ill-fated and much maligned commander, now placed himself squarely in the hands of ‘God and His Blessed Mother to bring him to a port of safety’.* 13

The report of the Armada’s inadvertent flight north reached Queen Elizabeth as she was addressing her troops at Tilbury camp on 18 August, more than a week after the event. But even this good news did not come rumour-free, for now the Duke of Parma and his army were said to be on their way across the Channel. It was not until the end of August that the Dean of St Paul’s was ordered to announce officially that the Armada had been defeated and Philip II’s agent in London was able to write home to Spain on 7 September that ‘the Lords of the Council went to St Paul’s to give thanks to God for having rescued the realm from its recent danger’. Just three days later, though, another alarm was spread that the Armada was on its way back. By the beginning of November, after ten weeks of continued uncertainty, the public’s nerves were frayed to unravelling point. Parliament, which was to have met on 12 November, was prorogued until February ‘as it was seen that both people and nobles were weary of so much trouble’, wrote Marco Antonio Micea, a Genoese resident in London. ‘We are in such alarm and terror here that there is no sign of rejoicing amongst the Councillors at the victories they have gained. They look rather like men who have a heavy burden to bear.’ Even Elizabeth, who was not normally chary when it came to her own personal safety, was persuaded by her Council to stay away from St Paul’s ‘for fear that a harquebuss might be fired at her’. Micea noted that the fifty-five-year-old Queen looked ‘much aged and spent’. Perhaps the Spanish fleet had made for Scotland and had succeeded in persuading King James VI to avenge his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots’ execution of the year before; or perhaps they had rounded Scotland and were now in Ireland, stirring up trouble among the rebels there. In response to this new fear the Queen ‘sent Sir Thomas Perrot to raise 2,000 men in Wales, and take them over [to Ireland] with all speed’. The extent of Elizabeth’s anxiety may be measured by her willingness to throw yet more money at the conflict.14

But if in England no one could quite believe they had won, on the Continent no one could believe that the Spanish had lost. The French ambassador in London had spent his summer merrily reporting stories of heavy English casualties, so when the English ambassador in Paris, Sir Edward Stafford, produced 400 pamphlets giving the English version of events, he was met with frank incredulity. ‘The English ambassador here had some fancy news printed stating that the English had been victorious,’ wrote Don Bernadino Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador in Paris, ‘but the people would not allow it to be sold, as they say it is all lies. One of the ambassador’s secretaries began to read in the palace a [report] which he said had been sent from England, but the people were so enraged that he was obliged to fly for his life.’ Only Pope Sixtus remained unimpressed by the European rumour-mill, refusing to loosen his grip on the million gold ducats he had promised Spain until he had better proof of Spanish success.15

On 24 November England at last felt confident enough to celebrate its victory and ‘a solemn procession…was held to give thanks to God for the scattering of the Spanish fleet’. Through winter streets hung with blue cloth, Elizabeth ‘was carried in a gilded chair…drawn by two grey horses royally caparisoned…to the great cathedral of St Paul’s’, from the battlements of which eleven captured Armada banners streamed out above the city. Here, Elizabeth read out a prayer she had composed specially for the occasion. The mood was one of relief, but also, more pertinently, of sober thanksgiving. In the words of the medal struck to celebrate England’s victory: ‘God blew and they were scattered’. The victory was His.16

And in giving this victory to God, Elizabeth extended a process begun by her father, Henry VIII, many years before: the process of nationalizing England’s state religion.* It was an inadvertent process, born out of fear: Henry’s fear of plunging his country back into yet another round of civil war if he failed to produce a male heir. And it was a process concluded in fear: the fear of standing alone and vulnerable against the richest and most powerful nation in Europe. The God who won the Armada could not be a Protestant God, at least not in the way Protestantism was understood throughout the rest of Europe. That God had demonstrably failed to help the Calvinists in the Low Countries; to protect the Huguenots of France from the St Bartholomew massacre of 1572; to save William of Orange from assassination in 1584. Neither could He be a Catholic. Not when the Armada carried at its head a consecrated standard bearing the rallying cry ‘Arise, oh Lord, and avenge thy cause’. Not when each ship had been provided with its own priest and each member of the expedition had received absolution in advance for the blood he would shed.* Therefore, He could only be an Anglican God, that compromise and most English of Gods, who continued to frustrate both Catholics and Protestants in almost equal measure.† So the subtle propaganda ran. In a Europe ravaged by wars of religion, only the English had chosen correctly.17

And how lucky it was that God should be an Anglican, an Englishman, for no one believed for a moment that England’s conflict with Catholic Spain was over. Indeed, at the beginning of November the Venetian ambassador to Spain reported home to the Doge that ‘In spite of everything, His Majesty shows himself determined to carry on the war.’ So though the coach that bore Elizabeth to St Paul’s Cathedral ‘was open in front and on both sides’ so that she might better be seen by crowds of cheering Londoners, yet her Government was taking no risks. An order had been given ‘that in every household along the route no one should be allowed to look out from the windows while she was passing, unless the householder was prepared to stake his life and entire fortune on his trustworthiness.’ This was an England gripped in the jaws of fear and suspicion.18

On Friday, 28 October 1588 a sailing ship beat its way slowly up the Norfolk coast. On board, its passengers scanned the shoreline for a suitable landing place. Having spotted what looked like a safe point between Happisburgh and Bacton, some miles to the south of Cromer, they ordered the crew to drop anchor until nightfall. As darkness fell the ship’s boat was launched and headed into shore. When it returned to the ship, it left standing on the beach two young Englishmen of whom the English Government had every reason to feel fearful and suspicious. The pair were Catholic priests belonging to the Society of Jesus, and their intention was to succeed where the Spanish Armada had failed: to return England to the Catholic Church. If the Armada was the latest in a progression of Franco-Spanish ‘Enterprises’ sanctioned by the Pope and designed to restore English Catholicism through force of arms, then these two young men represented Rome’s second line of spiritual attack: force of argument.* 19

Argument had always been the Christian Church’s best weapon against heresy, chiefly because most heretical behaviour was thought to be a consequence of ignorance, poor judgement, or an imperfect understanding of the teachings of Christ.† Such heretics were not sinful therefore, merely misguided, and required little more than clear reasoning to make them see the error of their ways. Of course there were other heretics who wilfully rejected Christ’s doctrines—out of pride, or a lust for power perhaps. They were sinners and merited the full weight of the Church’s wrath, which, ever since the eleventh century, had usually meant burning at the stake. There was a further subset of heresy still: schism, the rejection of papal supremacy. For the rebellious schismatic (who might uphold all Christ’s other teachings but this one) as for the misguided heretic, argument was deemed the best form of correction. So while Rome supported the invasion of England and the deposition of Elizabeth—her wilful heresy had imperilled the souls of her countrymen and God would forgive the use of force against her—it also dispatched its army of arguers. It was belief in the divine purpose of their argument that filled the two Englishmen now standing in the dark of a Norfolk beach, straining to hear above the noise of the waves on the shingle any sound to suggest their landing had been observed.* 20

Neither man had been long enough in Rome to forget the seeping chill of late October English rain. The bad weather that had so hampered the Armada had not abated and the year was ending with as cold a spell as it had begun. But the rain and the cold were the least of the two men’s worries as they now tried to put as much distance between them and the coast before dawn. In the dark it was impossible to pick a path that did not lead them up to a house instead of out into open fields. Twice, three times, a dog barked as they neared one of the fishermen’s cottages flanking the beach and hastily they retraced their steps. Finally, they headed into a nearby wood to take cover until first light. There, in whispers, they decided it would be safer to separate and each make his own way to London; that way, if one of them should be caught, the other still had a chance of reaching the capital undetected. As soon as it was light enough to see, the older of the two men, twenty-seven-year-old Edward Oldcorne, son of a Yorkshire bricklayer, made his way northwards out of the wood towards the town of Mundesley. On the road he fell in with a party of sailors, demobbed and returning home after the defeat of the Armada, and in their company and with the cover they unwittingly afforded him, he made his way to London.

Meanwhile, his companion was leaving the wood by a different path. John Gerard was twenty-four. He was born on 4 October 1564, the son of the prominent Lancashire landowner Sir Thomas Gerard, a former county sheriff.* At the age of five John Gerard was removed from his parents’ care when it was discovered his father was involved in a scheme to rescue the newly imprisoned Mary, Queen of Scots from Tutbury Castle in Staffordshire and restore her to the Scottish throne. Sir Thomas Gerard was arrested and held in the Tower of London until 1573. On his release he collected his eight-year-old son from the family of strangers on whom he had been forcibly billeted and returned with him to Lancashire, to Bryn Hall, the Gerards’ estate. Whatever the effect on John Gerard of being ripped from his home at so young an age, these events did little to persuade him to conform to the State Church. At the age of just twelve he was sent down from Exeter College, Oxford for refusing to attend a Protestant Easter service.21