The Watchers (12 page)

Sledd now kept his eyes and ears open. He began also to use his pen, keeping a journal with short entries for each day. By now it was August 1579, the month Pope Gregory XIII visited the English College, giving it the fantastic patronage of a yearly pension of 3,000 crowns and a charter of statutes. The greatest news of all, however, was the Pope's summoning to Rome of Doctor William Allen and the new exciting phase of Allen's mission to rescue England from heresy. Doctor Allen was expected in Rome any day. His presence would dominate Sledd's narrative in the months to come.

In fact Rome was buzzing with the anticipation of England's freedom from the tyranny of the heretics in Elizabeth's government. Sledd reported his candid conversations with Catholic Englishmen in
the city concerning the invasion of England and Ireland. They were excited at the Pope's support for a military expedition of Spanish troops led by an Irish adventurer called Sir James Fitzmaurice and an English priest, Nicholas Sander, to the south-west coast of Ireland. Fitzmaurice, Sander and their men set sail in June 1579, so it was no wonder that the prospects for their mission, for which there was huge optimism, were avidly discussed by English Catholics in Rome. In late August Salamon Aldred gave what Sledd called a ‘solemn dinner' at which the guests talked about the Fitzmaurice expedition, as well as the prospects for Queen Elizabeth's proposed union with the Duke of Anjou, one of the most controversial of her marriage negotiations. Was it possible, they wondered, that the queen could really marry a French Catholic, the son of Catherine de' Medici? After Aldred's dinner Luke Kirby and another priest invited Sledd to join them both in the English College ‘and by that means to make me priest for to serve my country shortly'.

Most exciting of all, however, was the arrival in Rome of William Allen. This happened three days after Aldred's dinner. It happened to be the same day that Sledd found work in the household of Nicholas Morton, a graduate of Cambridge and a Catholic churchman. Sledd was in the best possible position to be able to act as an eyewitness of truly historic events.

It would be hard to overestimate the authority and moral standing of William Allen in 1579. He was the great hope of English Catholics in exile. He was their guide, organizer and moral compass. To the government of Queen Elizabeth, however, he was probably the most determined and dangerous enemy England possessed other than Mary Queen of Scots: certainly he was the cleverest, the most intellectually assured and the most committed.

Born in Lancashire in 1532 and educated at Oxford University, where he became a fellow of Oriel College and principal of St Mary Hall, Allen had left England soon after the Protestant Church settlement had become law in 1559, travelling and teaching for a time in the Low Countries. He returned home for a time to recover from a serious illness. It was not an easy convalescence: Allen saw at first hand the compromises in their faith that Catholic men and women
were making even in a part of England as resistant to Protestantism as Lancashire. The experience shaped him profoundly. Leaving England for good in 1565, Allen went to Antwerp. Three years later he founded a seminary to train priests in the town of Douai in the Low Countries which had moved, by the time Allen was in Rome in 1579, to Rheims in France.

Allen was without doubt the spiritual leader of the mission to lead Elizabeth's England away from heresy back to the Catholic faith. He was passionate, single-minded and determined. At Douai and then at Rheims he trained and drilled the storm-troops of the mission, the young priests who were sent to England to begin the essential work of saving souls. He also became an astute politician, involved from the early 1570s in efforts to persuade the Pope and the King of Spain to mount an invasion of England. Allen was a brilliant polemicist and one of the best English prose stylists of the sixteenth century; he wrote stingingly effective attacks on what he saw as a vicious persecution of the true faithful. What Charles Sledd sensed in August 1579, instinctively and correctly, was the nervous hopeful excitement of a reinvigorated mission to send priests to work secretly in England. Above all, the English community in Rome anticipated the strength and single-mindedness of Doctor Allen's commitment to save his country from Protestantism.

Not surprisingly, September and October 1579 were months of busyness and preparation in Rome. William Allen made his dispositions for the English mission, taking ten men – priests and important laymen – for an audience with Pope Gregory. Afterwards Allen had a private conference with the Pope. With him was John Pascall, Allen's right hand in organizing the mission, his guide, his company during meals, his closest adviser. What Allen wanted to secure was the Pope's blessing and material support for sending priests secretly to England.

Eight days later, with Sledd in attendance upon his master Nicholas Morton and watching and listening carefully, Allen spoke to the guests he had invited to dine with him in the English College. Eighteen men were there. Sledd knew all of them by sight and a few more intimately, and later in his journal he recorded their names and physical descriptions. Two of the diners were Robert Persons, the young Jesuit priest whom Anthony Munday had known in the English College, and
William Allen's confidant John Pascall. But at the centre of everything and everyone was Doctor Allen himself, whose purpose that day was to rally the troops of the faith, to look to the recovery of England. In Allen – in his energy and political savvy, in his intellectual assurance – lay the future hope of their homeland's freedom.

Sledd remembered even the smallest physical features of the man who stood before them, in his late forties, tall and slim, with a reddish beard. The spy noted the wrinkles in his face, the small mole over his right eye, the way his long fingernails rose up at their tips. He absorbed every detail. Most importantly of all, Sledd remembered Doctor Allen's words.

Allen told them all how he had come to Rome at Pope Gregory's commandment and how generous Gregory had been in supporting the English seminaries in Rome and Rheims. Like the Englishmen in Rome, the Pope wanted to see their homeland restored to the Catholic faith. Allen ‘thundered out in speech' the expedition to Ireland of Nicholas Sander, James Fitzmaurice and five hundred Spanish troops. The force they led to the Tudor kingdom of Ireland was a promise of the full invasion to come. Allen said that the Pope and other Catholic princes were prepared to do even more than this. And then he spoke of the English mission, the rescue of the kingdom from Protestant heresy, with Gregory's support and encouragement. Allen's speech must have been an extraordinary and moving one, revealing his persuasive power to inspire and to motivate. Six priests were recruited for the mission there and then. They were told to get themselves ready to leave for England by the end of the month.

Allen lost no time. Full of missionary zeal, he and John Pascall went to the Pope to tell him of the six priests and to ask Gregory for money to support the enterprise. They were given three hundred crowns. The priests, Sledd wrote, ‘vaunted and boasted not a little in the city how they would hazard their lives for their country's sake'. Blessed by the Pope, the six men set off from Rome for England on the feast day of Saint Simon and Saint Jude, Wednesday, 28 October. Many more would eventually follow them. The new phase of the mission had begun.

In late November Nicholas Morton hosted a dinner for William Allen, John Pascall and other important Englishmen staying and living in
Rome. The dinner was a lively one, and politics was on everyone's minds. Sledd remembered that Doctor Allen was ‘marvellous pleasant and he gave to rehearse what news he had heard out of England and Ireland of late'. Pascall was thrilled by the intelligence that he, Luke Kirby and others had heard, by letters smuggled from England, of the successes of Fitzmaurice's Spanish troops in Ireland. Pascall went even further: he was in ‘good hope and would joy at his heart to see the Spaniards lords of England', till which time the land was in misery. Pascall wanted to have Queen Elizabeth ‘shaked off her estate, which he hoped would not be long before the matter were put in execution'. Allen said that even more priests would be sent to England. His enthusiasm was growing all the time. The new recruits would leave Rome in the coming spring of 1580.

Many months later, William Allen heard about Sledd's account of this dinner. He was outraged, dismissing Sledd as a menial servant and calling him a liar. There was venom in Allen's response:

As for Sledd's invention of conspiracy made in Doctor Morton's house, was it not very like that he should be made acquainted with the matter, being and living there as a poor knave … begging of everybody, and known of nobody, and therefore trusted and used no farther of his master but in servile things.

But as William Allen surely knew, the best spies were often humble men. A servant, perhaps unseen and certainly often unacknowledged by his betters, was able to hear and see things other men could not. We can imagine the young Sledd obediently attending on his master's table with very sharp ears to hear.

After dinner on Sunday, 29 November Nicholas Morton met a priest, a chaplain to Cardinal Darrogone. The matter was a confidential one, but Sledd was listening and watching. He wrote that the two men had a scroll of paper upon which was written the names of leading English Catholic émigrés, soldiers and rebels. Sledd suspected here a great conspiracy, for according to his account Morton and the priest spoke of secret signatories and of three copies of a document, one to be kept by the Pope, the second sent to Spain and the third directed either to William Allen or to Sir Francis Englefield, one of the leading exiles in the Low Countries. According to Sledd, the documents
recorded the agreements made by the Pope and King Philip of Spain to restore England to the Catholic faith. What Sledd had discovered, it seems, was a master plan for invasion and conquest.

Sledd's time in Rome was coming to an end, for he too was about to be sent back towards England in the company of Doctor Allen's missionary priests. This time Allen himself was travelling with the party back to Rheims. With him was his brother Gabriel, who spoke in a strong Lancashire accent, and whom Sledd clearly did not like: he called Gabriel Allen a clownish man. Sledd described the travellers with his usual precision. Humphrey Ely, who wore a short brown beard, was in his late thirties. Henry Orton, a lawyer, was about thirty years old and an excellent French speaker. Robert Johnson, a priest, was perhaps forty. He was slim, with an untrimmed flaxen yellow beard, a face full of wrinkles and two teeth missing from the right-hand side of his upper jaw. He spoke Italian fluently.

The Allen brothers and the priests bound for England, along with the quietly efficient Charles Sledd, set out on their long hard journey out of Italy after mass on the feast day of Saint Matthew, Thursday, 25 February 1580. They were in a lively mood. Sledd wrote that before supper on that first day Humphrey Ely spoke hard defamatory words against Elizabeth, ‘Mistress Bess, Queen of England'. They would ‘set her out for another Jezebel'. Elizabeth's tyranny would soon be at an end. Spirits were high.

Sledd and Robert Johnson moved ahead of the others. They left the main party at Siena on 28 February and arrived in Bologna on Friday, 4 March, where they were entertained by the Cardinal of Bologna and lodged in his palace. He gave them a private audience; they kissed his right hand; he gave them both a blessing ‘stretching right two of his forefingers'. The cardinal asked them if they were travelling to England. Johnson answered for them both. Yes, he said, they were sent to England by the Pope to reconcile Queen Elizabeth and her people to the Catholic faith: it was His Holiness's pleasure to send priests to England secretly to persuade Catholics to resist her: Gregory was minded to deprive Elizabeth of her princely dignities, by either conspiring her death or supporting open rebellion and an invasion. Johnson told the cardinal that the missionary priests were messengers
sent to prepare the ways and means. After all, Elizabeth was excommunicated already. The cardinal replied that he knew of the Pope's intentions ‘for all such business as he meant secretly and openly to be be executed'. He wished for their happy success in converting queen and people. If repentance did not come quickly, he said, there would be great bloodshed.

On that Friday evening Sledd and Johnson enjoyed the cardinal's hospitality. They ate supper and had breakfast next morning. When they were about to leave on Saturday, William Allen and his companions arrived at the cardinal's palace. Allen once again instructed Johnson and Sledd to move ahead of the main party, directing them from Bologna to Milan to deliver letters. They were to wait for him in Turin.

The two men, priest and watcher, arrived in Milan on 11 March. They went to the Cardinal of Milan, at whose palace they met nine men and boys, some of them Englishmen, travelling to Rome. Sledd talked to one of the boys, a Londoner of about fifteen whose father had sent him to William Allen's seminary in Rheims, ‘requesting them to send him to Rome if they pleased, to the college'. Sledd and Johnson went in the opposite direction, heading for home. Johnson was passionate in his mission: ‘he cared not for any in England,' Sledd wrote, ‘and they should well understand and also know in England that he would not creep in at a window, for he would go in at the broad door.'

By now William Allen was using Sledd as a courier to carry his letters. It was a task Sledd, like other Elizabethan spies, took to easily. He delivered Allen's letter in Milan and received one in return, and he was able to intercept two packets directed from Rheims. Four days later, on Tuesday, 15 March, Sledd and Johnson caught up with Allen and the others at Turin. Allen replied to the letter Sledd had brought him from Milan and Sledd took it to the Jesuit college in Turin to be posted.

With Sledd working as William Allen's messenger he and Johnson now fell behind the main party. It took the two companions exactly a week to travel from Turin to Chambéry in Savoy, not a surprise given the perilous journey over the Alps in late March. They would have gone over Mont-Cenis, the usual way for travellers on the post road to Lyons. They arrived in Chambéry on 22 March. There they were told that Allen and his companions had set out that day for Lyons,
going by the most direct road west. This, they were advised, was a dangerous way to take; a Huguenot rebellion had broken out; they should go to Lyons by way of Lake Geneva, a much longer journey.