Bloody Questions

God’s Secret Agents

Queen Elizabeth’s Forbidden Priests and the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot

by Alice Hogge

HarperCollins, 464 pp., $27.95

WHEN DID THE REFORMATION, understood as the struggle between the Catholic and Protestant theologies, end in England? The answer given when I was at school was: on November 17, 1558, the day London received news of the death of Queen Mary. Henry Machyn, a contemporary diarist, wrote of the city’s rejoicing; church bells rang, impromptu street parties were held to “make merry for the new Queen.” The 25-year-old Princess Elizabeth had survived to inherit the throne largely by making sure that nobody knew what her real opinions were about any matter of importance, including religion. She dispensed with much Catholic ceremony and professed her love of Scripture, yet she detested the radical Puritan party within the Church of England and forbade private meetings for prayer and Bible study. In pursuit of international diplomacy she was willing to entertain offers of marriage from Catholic noblemen abroad, while famously protesting that her real “marriage” was to her loving subjects.

The Prayer Book that appeared in 1559, far from being a reprint of the previous Protestant Prayer Book issued under Edward VI in 1552, was a cunning amalgam of Catholic and Protestant formularies, enshrining the much-vaunted “Elizabethan Settlement,” which finally secured the reformed religion of the Church of England.

But, the conventional answer to my opening question could not be more mistaken. Arguably, the Reformation ended only in 1688 when Parliament effectively forced the abdication of the last Catholic king of England, James II, and replaced him with the Dutch Protestant William III. The two books under review remind us forcibly that the Elizabethan Settlement settled nothing at all. It merely brought to a head the tension between the two parallel communities that made up the English nation. Elizabeth’s excommunication was issued by Pope Pius V only in 1570, so that England remained a Catholic country for the first 12 years of her reign. The pope’s action raised crucial questions about the individual’s conflicting obligations as citizen and as member of a faith community. Initially, the only legal sanction on Catholics was a fine for non attendance at church services. Such a moderate policy was not maintained, however, in the face of repeated attempts by Catholic powers abroad and their sympathizers at home to unseat Elizabeth in favor of Mary, Queen of Scots. A succession of plots in the 1560s and ’70s led to new and heavier fines, more repressive measures, and finally to a state of affairs in which to be a Catholic could constitute high treason, punishable by the agonizing death of hanging, drawing, and quartering.

Stephen Budiansky’s Her Majesty’s Spymaster adds little to what is already known about Sir Francis Walsingham (1532-1590), Elizabeth’s secretary of state, who combined the roles of a modern home secretary and foreign secretary in a post that, as one of his clerks observed, required its holder to “understand the state of the whole realm.” The Queen herself called Walsingham “a rank Puritan,” yet trusted his loyalty and discretion. Walsingham’s espionage network was stunningly efficient and far-reaching, and the machinations of Mary, Queen of Scots, and her circle never stood a chance of success; all their “secret” correspondence was intercepted, and some of it actually initiated, by Walsingham’s agents. When a wave of missionary priests was launched from seminaries in Douai and Rome to try to reconvert England, Walsingham opposed the use of torture and execution, which would simply make martyrs of their victims, arguing that imprisonment or deportation would be better. His clemency did not extend to Mary, whom he hated, and he raged (not always privately) at Elizabeth’s indecision and ambiguous behavior over her cousin’s fate.

The picture that emerges from Budiansky’s book is of an austere intellectual, devoted to his royal mistress, taking no pleasure in his activities but recognizing they were a distasteful necessity, and that it was important to perform them well. Budiansky’s conversational style makes for easy reading, but he is massively dependent on previous research by others.

Alice Hogge’s God’s Secret Agents is an altogether weightier book whose argument is, for once, neatly caught in the dust-jacket blurb; her narrative moves from “men who would die for their cause” to “men who would kill for it.” Between the executions of Edmund Campion in 1581 and Henry Garnet in 1606, a significant change of mood and tactics swept over the Catholic mission. The notion of regicide would have horrified the Elizabethan missionary priests, who desired to succor their flock, and to reconcile the English to the true faith by persuasion and example of holiness of life, not by intimidation or violence. Campion, and his fellow-traveler Robert Persons (who fled England and escaped execution), had been educated at Douai, where discussion of English politics was forbidden; he insisted that he was a loyal Englishman whose only concern was “the glory of God and benefit of souls.” Robert Southwell, executed in 1595, declared at his trial, “I confess I am a Catholic priest, and I thank God for it, but no traitor; neither can any law make it treason to be a priest.” (Unfortunately, that was precisely what the law had done.) He prayed for the queen on the scaffold, moments before his execution.

The situation in 1605 was very different. Soon after his accession in 1603, James VI promised not to persecute any Catholics who “will be quiet, and give but outward obedience to the law.” Far from being excommunicated, he had received congratulatory messages from the pope and foreign Catholic monarchs; his other kingdom, Scotland, was at peace with Spain. England, however, was not. When James’s conciliatory words were not translated into actions, Catholic hotheads began to plot against him, making substantial concessions out of the question. They activated contacts with Spain, claiming to be able to muster a formidable army behind any projected invasion. Despite repeated pleas for restraint by Jesuit leaders, the Gunpowder Plot, which, if successful, would have murdered not only the king but members of both houses of Parliament (including senior bishops), went ahead. For Robert Catesby, one of the conspirators, it was a question of retributive justice: “[I]n that place [Parliament] they have done us all the mischief, and perchance God has designed that place for their punishment.” The plotters’ motives were openly treacherous; they had nothing to do with concern for the spiritual welfare of others.

Here we approach the heart of the conundrum of conscience with which many Catholics had to wrestle. Where did their true allegiance lie: with their sovereign or with the pope? The so-called Bloody Question was put to defendant after defendant: Suppose the pope were to send an army into England and declare that his only aim was to reconcile the kingdom to Catholicism, and command you to support him. What would you do? Alice Hogge is clear that this question nails the “fundamental dishonesty at the heart of the English Catholic position,” since that position involved the pretence that theological and political allegiances were separate. Despite longstanding uncertainty about the extent of papal power, and historical instances of papal pronouncements being ignored by monarchs when it suited them, the Bloody Question was unanswerable.

Campion, asked whether he acknowledged Elizabeth’s right to rule, replied that he could make no comment on Pius V’s opinion. Others gave other answers; that the case was purely hypothetical, or that it would depend on the pope’s motives; or that, in the words of John Gerard, “I would behave as a loyal Catholic and a loyal subject.” Garnet, who had come by his knowledge of the Gunpwder Plot in the confessional and was therefore forbidden to reveal it, was a living witness to the irreconcilability of nationalism and faith, although he duly prayed for the king at his execution.

Garnet’s trial is famous for another reason, known to every reader of Shakespeare’s Macbeth: the question of “equivocation.” Was it morally defensible to lie in order to further one’s cause? Could a disguised priest deny that he was a priest? Strictly, denial was sacrilege, yet in common law no man was bound to incriminate himself; besides, to tell the truth might implicate others besides the priest. Accordingly, in self-defense, Jesuit priests were allowed to reply to damning questions by ambiguous words or by making some mental qualification to their answer, which gave it a truth not apparent from the words spoken. Southwell defended equivocation at his trial, but to his hearers it was mere casuistry. At Garnet’s trial the issue was again central. The prosecution was able to show that he had given ambiguous answers to questions in interrogation, and thereby to depict him as a perjurer. When the Porter in Macbeth, first performed in 1606, refers to “an equivocator that could swear in both the scales against either scale, who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven,” the point

of the allusion would have been inescapable.

Shakespeare may have had a role in this story earlier, though Alice Hogge does not mention it. In 1581, Edmund Campion called briefly at Hoghton Hall, the Lancashire house of a Catholic family. In his book Shakespeare: The ‘Lost’ Years (1985), E.A.J. Honigmann argues that Shakespeare was living at Hoghton at that time, perhaps as tutor to the Hoghton children. Honigmann’s case remains controversial, not least because he maintains that Shakespeare was brought up as a Catholic; however, his book, and a more recent one by Richard Wilson (Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion and Resistance, 2004) set out extensive connections between Shakespeare, his family, and the underworld of Catholic recusancy that, in sum, I find compelling, and which I recommend to any interested reader.

Alice Hogge has produced a well-researched, skillfully crafted book that evokes the physical as well as the intellectual world of Renaissance English Catholicism. (She has visited the houses in which the architect Nicholas Owen constructed hiding places for priests, and vividly evokes their close, musty atmosphere.) Her study raises questions about what happens when religious and national identities clash that, in the wake of last year’s London suicide bombings, have acquired a new and terrible topicality.

Paul Dean is head of English at Dragon School, Oxford.