God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests & the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot (22 page)

While Walpole still languished in York Castle, Henry Garnet had written to Aquaviva asking to be informed of priests’ impending departures: ‘help can be sent over without incurring any hazard,’ he explained, ‘if I am given warning beforehand, so that I can determine what place they are to be put ashore’. In response to Persons’ efforts to develop safe routes home, part of Garnet’s job had now become the development of secure landing places. This was easier in the more remote parts of the country. The Jesuit Richard Holtby, busy expanding operations in the north of England since his return home in 1589, was able to establish two new landing sites for priests on the River Tyne at Hebburn and St Anthony’s, just upstream from South Shields. They remained undiscovered for twenty years. On the more heavily defended southern shores of England it was harder to conceal clandestine activity and here Garnet was dependent on the assistance of Catholic families. Henry Hubert, William Weston’s guide in 1584, owned land bordering the Suffolk coast at Kitley, Kessingland and Pakefield; elsewhere, the powerful Arundell family owned Chideock on the Dorset coast, six miles to the east of Lyme Regis. Both these estates were quickly made available to the mission and soon Garnet was in contact with many more Catholic families in possession of coastal property.
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With their cooperation, it seems he was able to establish a number of safe entry points for his returning missionaries and with Walpole’s arrest serving as an added impetus to the mission to maintain these sites carefully, it now became increasingly rare for a priest to be captured on landing.
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Having landed, though, the next challenge for any priest was to make contact with the mission’s organizers. Again the evidence is fragmentary, but it appears missionaries were supplied with only the first name in a chain of connections leading them underground and into hiding. In most cases the name was that of a prominent Catholic family in or near London. William Weston was given the name of the Bellamy family of Uxendon near Harrow, well known to Robert Persons from his time in England. In addition, he was given ‘some small articles, tokens of friendship’ that Mrs Bellamy would recognize; these precautions were necessary to safeguard the family from entrapment by spies claiming to be priests. Neither Henry Garnet nor Robert Southwell provides any clues as to the contact name they were given, but Garnet later told Aquaviva that on their first day in London ‘by chance we met the man we were looking for…[and]…we were safely hidden away’. Even John Gerard, who in his first hours ashore had found himself a safe house and a future base for his apostolate in Norfolk, eventually made his way to London to contact ‘some [unnamed] Catholics’. The logic was simple. London, with its crowds and its bustle, was the easiest place for a returning priest to pass unnoticed; prominent Catholic families were among those most likely to have taken precautions against Government informers; and, as Richard Topcliffe’s attempts to discover Garnet’s whereabouts from Henry Walpole revealed, no priest could divulge, even under the severest torture, information of which he was not in possession.
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If, by now, the Government viewed the English Jesuit Superior as the linchpin of the Catholic mission, then the mission, itself, was doing everything in its power to protect him. Jesuit Oswald Tesimond, writing of his experiences on the mission, explained: ‘the place where [Garnet] lived was known to very few persons, who could be thoroughly trusted’. It was only through these tried and trusted Catholics that a newly arrived priest, whether Jesuit or seminarian, could gain an introduction to Garnet and, through him, placement in a safe house out of town.
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Even after a missionary had been stationed with a Catholic family it appears this practice of withholding all potentially damaging information from him continued. The unnamed priest’s report on life in hiding quoted earlier revealed that ‘except when the Superior visited them, [priests] scarcely ever saw one of the Society, or any other Priest’. Isolation, both from the family they served and from each other, was now the missionary’s main guarantee of safety. Even Garnet subscribed to this rule. In August 1587 he wrote to Aquaviva describing how ‘yesterday I accidentally met our Robert [Southwell] in the street…I am altogether unable to tell you what joy this sight gave me’. The more a priest was in contact with his fellows and the more he knew where each of those fellows was stationed, then the more his capture and torture threatened to topple the entire operation.
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Loneliness was a cruelly ignominious fate for all those now pouring into England, heaven-bent on martyrdom, but it was on these lonely priests in their lonely attics that the hopes of every English Catholic rested. Loneliness was keeping the faith alive.

There are, though, exceptions to every rule. At the beginning of the second week in October 1591, from all corners of England, separately and in pairs, a party of men converged on Warwickshire, to a small manor house near Knowle, hidden from its neighbours by a dense belt of trees. From Essex rode John Gerard, joining, en route from London, Robert Southwell. From Hindlip Hall, just eighteen miles away, rode Edward Oldcorne and Thomas Lister, and from Yorkshire rode Richard Holtby. In all some dozen or so priests—all the Jesuits then at liberty in England plus representatives of the seminaries of Reims and Rome—made this journey, through woodlands of ochre and amber, through the first wraith-like mists of early autumn.
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The timing was no accident. ‘Our adversaries’, wrote Garnet, ‘are engrossed in a general election throughout the kingdom and with devising new methods of persecution’: it was the ideal time to meet in secret.
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These secret meetings were a biannual occurrence and their purpose was twofold: practical and spiritual. They were forums in which to discuss business and strategy, to plan for the future, to counsel lay Catholics, discipline the wayward and disseminate information picked up piecemeal from the farthest corners of the kingdom. Consequently, they were vital to the mission’s success. As Garnet explained to Aquaviva, it was there that ‘we forged new weapons for new battles’.
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They were also vital to each individual attending them. None of the Jesuits then in England had been a member of the Society more than fifteen years, none had yet taken his final vows, most were little more than novices. For a religious order founded on rigid training and discipline this was an unsatisfactory state of affairs, particularly given the adverse conditions in which its members now found themselves operating. The meetings provided an opportunity to redress this balance, allowing participants to renew their spiritual vows, to make confession and, above all, to experience a brief sense of community amid so much isolation. As John Gerard explained, ‘I never found anything that did me more good. It braced my soul.’ So twice a year, conditions permitting, Henry Garnet summoned the Jesuits together.
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It seems certain the meeting of 1591 was held at Baddesley Clinton, a medieval manor built of local honey-grey Warwickshire sandstone, moated and fortified, and belonging, since 1517, to the Catholic Ferrers family. Its current owner was Henry Ferrers the lawyer, antiquarian and diarist, described by contemporary historian William Camden as ‘a man both for parentage and for knowledge of antiquity very commendable’. For four years now, though, Ferrers had leased the house to two sisters, the twenty-five-year old Anne Vaux and the widowed Eleanor Brooksby, two years her senior, daughters of Lord Vaux, the Catholic grandee who had already done so much to fund and assist the mission. The sisters had first begun harbouring priests at the family’s Shoby estate in Leicestershire in the early 1580s; it was there that Henry Garnet was sent on his return to England, while Robert Southwell was stationed at the family’s town house in Hackney, northeast of the city of London. Since then the two women had become an essential part of Garnet’s team of lay assistants and it was in order to provide the Jesuit Superior with a base in the heart of England that Eleanor had rented Baddesley Clinton.
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On the evening of 14 October 1591 the meeting began. There is no record of the business discussed, but high on the agenda would have been the rumours then circulating the country of a new Spanish-led Armada against England and of the measures that would assuredly be taken against the English Catholics should that Armada sail. And certainly Garnet would have wished to outline his fears of more trouble ahead for the mission after a summer of comparative calm. The ‘peace which we enjoy here from time to time is not due to any easement of the laws or to greater freedom in the practice of our religion’, he would explain, ‘but to a respite that will usher in a period of ever greater harshness’. Each priest then met with Garnet privately and on the final day, 18 October, after High Mass, they renewed their spiritual vows.
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Until then Garnet had remained calm, reassuring those who spoke of the dangers involved in congregating under one roof with the words ‘Yes, we ought not to meet all at the same time now that our numbers are growing every day. But we are gathered for God’s glory. Until we have renewed our vows the responsibility is mine; after that it is yours’. Now that those vows had been renewed, and as the priests sat down to eat, he grew agitated, warning ‘us all’, reported John Gerard, ‘to look to ourselves and not to stay on without very good reason’. Garnet, himself, wrote afterwards, ‘I know not what inspiration made me address them as follows: saying that, though up to now I had taken on myself all responsibility, I was no longer willing to guarantee them their safety, when dinner was over.’ Immediately they had finished their meal a number of the party saddled their horses and rode away. At five the following morning Baddesley Clinton was raided.
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‘I was making my meditation,’ wrote John Gerard, ‘Father Southwell was beginning Mass and the rest were at prayer, when suddenly I heard a great uproar outside the main door. Then I heard a voice shouting and swearing at a servant who was refusing them entrance.’ The house was surrounded, with guards posted on every track leading up to it. The surprise was complete.
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It was Southwell who reacted first. ‘He guessed what it was all about,’ recorded Gerard, ‘and slipped off his vestments and stripped the altar bare.’ The others gathered up their possessions and hid them away. The ‘beds presented a problem: as they were still warm and merely covered in the usual way preparatory to being made, some of us went off and turned [them] and put the cold side up to delude anyone who put his hand in to feel them’.
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Downstairs, the servants were holding the pursuivants back, explaining from behind the bolted and barred front door that ‘the mistress of the house, a widow, was not yet up, but was coming down at once to answer them’. Eleanor Brooksby was spirited away to a hiding place at the top of the house; she ‘was somewhat timid’, noted Garnet, ‘and unable to face with calm the threatening grimaces of the officer’s men’. Anne Vaux now assumed Eleanor’s role and still in her nightgown came to the door to interview the search party. She played for time. ‘Does it seem right and proper that you should be admitted into a widow’s house before either she or her maids or her children have risen?’ For as long as she was able, Anne kept the men in conversation on the doorstep: each second now was precious. Finally, she could hold them back no longer and the ransack began.
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‘They tore madly through the whole house,’ wrote John Gerard, ‘searched everywhere, pried with candles into the darkest corners.’ Anne Vaux likened them to children playing blind man’s buff, ‘covering their eyes and then trying to touch and grasp’ everything about them. ‘You should have seen them’, she told Garnet afterwards: ‘here was a searcher pounding the walls in unbelievable fury, there another shifting side-tables, turning over beds.’ After a while Anne offered them breakfast, presiding over the table with deliberate courtesy while her servants combed the house for anything incriminating. Then the search continued.
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Beneath the servants’ quarters, huddled in a narrow sewage channel running the length of the southwest wing of the house, the hunters’ quarry—five Jesuits, two seminary priests, plus two or three Jesuit servants—listened in silence to the destruction taking place above their heads.
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The channel was airless and dank and the water from the moat beyond lapped at their ankles. At its highest point the channel measured only four feet, so the men crouched or bent double in the darkness, straining to identify the noises echoing down the former garderobe shaft through which they had entered. Among them stood Nicholas Owen, the man responsible for converting the sewer into a hiding place; between his companions and capture lay a camouflaged trapdoor, covering the top of the garderobe shaft, which itself was concealed within the thickness of the wall. As the search overhead grew more frantic still, as furniture was overturned and panelling sounded for space behind, this trapdoor must have seemed like scant protection.
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It took a bribe of twelve gold pieces before the pursuivants were finally happy to leave the house.
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Still the priests waited in the tunnel, though, allowing the men to go ‘a good long way, so that there was no danger of their turning back suddenly, as they sometimes do’, explained John Gerard. Only then did they emerge from the hide. They had been there over four hours.
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The raid at Baddesley Clinton had brought home two important points to those involved in it. First, that under the guidance of Nicholas Owen the policy of hide-building was working. In the lethal game of cat-and-mouse being played out across the country by pursuivants and priests, the mouse now stood at least a sporting chance of survival. Second, that the Jesuit network was now too successful ever to be put in such jeopardy again. After the abortive years of the early 1580s, when effort after effort to establish a Jesuit base had failed, there were now nine Jesuits at work throughout England, in charge of a fully functioning countrywide mission; and more were eager to join their number. At a single stroke this network had almost been destroyed. It seems that the 1591 Baddesley Clinton conference was the last occasion that all the English Jesuits met together in one place for many years to come.