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

And if the new Anglican Church was built upon the bedrock of compromise, then many who attended it did so in the same spirit. When, in the summer of 1562, a number of prominent Catholics approached the Spanish ambassador, and through him Rome, to ask if they might worship in the Queen’s new Church, the answer they received (in the negative) was not considered absolute enough to act upon, so worship there they did. When many local priests became aware of the level of Catholic feeling in their parishes they made adjustments accordingly; so Catholics might have ‘Mass said secretly in their own houses by those very priests who in church publicly celebrated the [Protestant] liturgy’. To compromise made sound political sense.23

But could it ever make spiritual sense? The notorious sixteenth century Cambridge academic, Dr Andrew Perne of Peterhouse, ‘was known to have changed his religion three or four times to suit the change of ruler’, but when Perne was asked by a close friend ‘to tell her honestly and simply which was the holy religion that would see her safe to heaven’, he replied, ‘I beg you never to tell anyone what I am going to say…If you wish, you can live in the religion which the Queen and the whole kingdom profess—you will have a good life, you will have none of the vexations which Catholics have to suffer. But don’t die in it. Die in faith and communion with the Catholic Church, that is, if you want to save your soul.’ Perne never had the chance to heed his own advice: he died suddenly, on the way back to his room after dining with the Archbishop of Canterbury, caught out not only in the wrong faith, but also in the headquarters of that faith, Lambeth Palace itself. But this was the dilemma facing all Englishmen now: how did you square your political survival with your spiritual salvation, if, like vast numbers of your fellow countrymen, you still regarded yourself as Catholic? Happy were those whose conscience and the law agreed. For those others, the future, both in this world and the next, looked much more uncertain.24

In November 1561, three years into Elizabeth’s reign, the mayor of Oxford had the unpleasant task of informing the Privy Council that ‘there were not three houses in [Oxford] that were not filled with papists’. And, added the new Spanish ambassador, Bishop Alvaro de la Quadra, in his regular gossip-filled letter to the Duchess of Parma, ‘the Council were far from pleased, and told the Mayor to take care not to say such a thing elsewhere’. But to those with any knowledge of the city’s past, this level of defiance will have come as no surprise: Oxford was running true to form. Deep in the cellars below the Mitre Inn on the High Street, at the Swan Inn, the Star Inn and the Catherine Wheel, Oxford’s Catholics were meeting in secret and in droves to celebrate their forbidden mass.* 25

If the city of Oxford was reluctant to embrace the new Church, then its university was proving even more mutinous. In May 1559 the Swiss Protestant Heinrich Bullinger was confidentially advised against sending his son to college at Oxford, for ‘it is as yet a den of thieves, and of those who hate the light’. That same month John Jewel, now Bishop of Salisbury, was noting with some frustration that ‘our universities are in a most lamentable condition: there are not above two in Oxford of our sentiments’. And when Elizabeth’s visitors arrived at the university that year to enforce the new religious settlement, they were daunted by the strength of Catholic opposition they encountered.26

At New College they avoided asking everyone to subscribe to the Oaths of Supremacy and Uniformity for fear of the number of refusals, reported Nicholas Sanders, a fellow of that college. The Bishop of Winchester, the visitor responsible for New College, found similar hostility at his other wards, Trinity, Corpus Christi and Magdalen. Here, too, he declined to look closely. Instead, he and his fellow visitors concentrated their attention on what they saw as the root of the problem: the men in charge. Within two years only one of Oxford’s college heads appointed during the previous reign remained in office and with that the Council seemed to be content. Let these new replacements keep their house in order and play the heavy hand. That the sole surviving college to retain its Marian head, New College, was the scene of widespread, Council-led purges throughout the first decade of the reign merely seemed to support the wisdom of the Government’s policy.27

Then fate stepped in to send the precarious balance of European power reeling. In July 1559 an unlucky tilt at a French court tournament left King Henri II dead, his fifteen-year-old heir, François, in the sway of his zealous cousins the Guises, and his teenage daughter-in-law, Mary Stuart, sufficiently emboldened to have herself heralded with cries of ‘Make way for the Queen of England!’ A nettled Elizabeth was soon persuaded by her Council to send money to help the Protestant, anti-French rebellion in Scotland and quickly the situation spiralled into open confrontation.28

In early 1560, mindful of the need to present a strong show of national unity in times of danger and fearful that the conflict had fallen far too neatly into battle lines of an awkwardly religious nature, Elizabeth sent her visitors back to Oxford. Soon Bishop de la Quadra was reporting home that ‘Oxford students…[known to be Catholic]…have been taken…[and imprisoned]…in great numbers’. Was this how it was going to be from now on? Each time an enemy threatened was any Englishman not seen to be standing foursquare behind the Queen’s new church and openly obeying her laws liable to arrest and imprisonment? The detention of six Oxford students the following year, for resisting the mayor’s attempts to remove their college crucifix, seemed to confirm this. As Elizabeth braced herself for the return home to Scotland of the newly widowed Mary, it was more the openness of the students’ defiance that earned them their prison sentence: after all, the ultra-conservative Elizabeth still kept a crucifix in her own royal chapel.29

A pattern was being established, a pattern that those English Catholics arrested for attending mass at the French embassy in February 1560, even as the situation in Scotland worsened, might have been able to spot for themselves. The rationale behind it was simple. Had England’s fortunes been entirely separate from those of Europe then Elizabeth and her government could have been content to settle back and let the dismantling of the English Catholic Church be a gradual one, sure in the knowledge that in time the majority of their countrymen would come round to their way of thinking. But England was as entangled with the rest of Europe as religion ever was with politics.* It was a part of the Christian Church, the Church that had bound Europe together. That Church was now divided into factions and while Europe was still known as Christendom, England, like it or not, was integral to that factional struggle. And it was vital to Europe’s equilibrium: its fragile diplomatic alliances with France and Spain in turn keeping either of those two nations from ever singly dominating the European stage—a necessity for Europe, but a constant irritation to successive generations of ambitious French and Spanish monarchs.30

With this the case, conflict was inevitable. For though Elizabeth might have no stomach for religious persecution, still she needed to keep her throne safe from predatory interlopers from across the narrow English Channel. And though England’s Catholics might be loyal to England, still they began to find themselves the focus of increasing and unwelcome Government-imposed restrictions every time affairs in mainland Europe took a turn for the worse.

But if this was a pattern that would emerge more clearly as Elizabeth’s reign progressed, then Oxford’s particular place within that pattern was predictable from the start. And from the start Elizabeth tried to forestall it.

On Saturday, 31 August 1566, ‘about 5 or 6 of the clock at night’, Queen Elizabeth I rode into Oxford. Her wooing of the city, and its university, had begun.31

At the head of the royal procession were the Queen’s heralds. Behind them came the Earl of Leicester, in his official role as Chancellor of the university, then the Mayor of Oxford and his party of aldermen, the noblemen of the court, and finally Elizabeth herself. Her

‘chariot was open on all sides, and on a gilded seat in the height of regal magnificence reposed the Queen. Her head-dress was a marvel of woven gold, and glittered with pearls and other wonderful gems; her gown was of the most brilliant scarlet silk woven with gold, partly concealed by a purple cloak lined with ermine after the manner of a triumphal robe. Beside the chariot rode the royal cursitors, resplendent in coats of cloth of gold, and the marshals, who were kept busy preventing the crowds from pressing too near to the person of the Queen…The royal guard, magnificent in gold and scarlet, brought up the rear. Of these there were about two hundred…and on their shoulders they bore…iron clubs like battle-axes.’

Through the north gate they streamed. Down Northgate Street (now Cornmarket), where the scholars who lined the road sank awe-struck to their knees and called out Vivat Regina Elizabetha, hearing their cry taken up by the townspeople leaning from the windows and crammed precariously together on the roof-tops above them. To Carfax, where Giles Lawrence, Oxford’s Regius Professor, welcomed the Queen with an oration in Greek to which Elizabeth responded warmly in the same tongue, thanking Lawrence for his speech and praising it as the best she had heard in that language, adding coyly ‘we would answer you presently, but with this great company we are somewhat abashed’. Lawrence was transfixed.

On down Fish Street (St Aldates) the procession flowed, to Christ Church College, where the gate and walls were festooned with verses in Latin and Greek in admiration of Elizabeth and where, beneath a canopy borne by four Doctors of the university, the Queen was ushered slowly across the quadrangle into the cool and calm of the great cathedral. Here Elizabeth knelt in prayer as Dr Godwin, Christ Church’s Dean, gave thanks for her safe arrival in the city. To the sound of cornets the choir sang the Te Deum and then wearily Elizabeth slipped away through the gardens in the lengthening dusk, to her lodgings in the east wing, to prepare for this, her latest charm offensive.

It was the Queen’s first visit to Oxford. An earlier attempt two years before had been called off at the last moment when plague broke out in the city. But this delay merely ensured that by the time Elizabeth made her dramatic appearance at the north gate anticipation had grown to fever pitch. It also meant that those charged with arranging the visit had left little to chance.

On the Wednesday before the Queen’s arrival the Earl of Leicester and Sir William Cecil had ridden the eight miles from the Palace of Woodstock to Oxford, through the sluicing rain of a late summer downpour, to check for themselves that everything was in order. Leicester, as Oxford’s Chancellor, was host for the week and with his ambition to marry the Queen still intact at this date—just five years earlier, with his brother-in-law acting as go-between, he had approached the Spanish ambassador and offered to return England to the Catholic Church if Spain backed their wedding, a far cry from his later reincarnation as the scourge of English Catholicism—there was more at stake for him here than mere proprietorial embarrassment should Oxford’s hospitality fail to please the Queen. But for Sir William Cecil, Elizabeth’s Principal Secretary of State and her chief adviser on all policies relating to Church and foreign affairs, Oxford’s performance was a matter for greater concern still.32

Each day of the royal visit Elizabeth and her entourage would attend debates and disputations, the art of which formed the basis of every student’s education. On the Tuesday a rising young Oxford star, Edmund Campion of St John’s College, would triumph in the Natural Philosophy Disputation, proposing ‘that the tides are caused by the moon’s motion’. Elizabeth, who in later life would be revered as the moon goddess, Cynthia, the ‘wide ocean’s empress’, was delighted with Campion’s speech; Cecil and Leicester immediately offered to become his patrons.* But it was indicative of the Government’s continued anxiety over the problem of Oxford’s religious insubordination that Cecil had provided the students in advance with a list of preferred subjects for these debates. Thursday’s Divinity Disputation took as its Council-chosen theme ‘Whether subjects may fight against wicked princes?’, allowing little scope for awkward theological reasoning.† It would have been a brave—and short-lived—undergraduate who dared to denounce Elizabeth’s break with Rome as wicked to her face; more embarrassing and more damaging still to the royal party would have been a spirited and unopposed defence of the Catholic faith. Oxford’s young students were to be given little opportunity to air their religious grievances.33

But Elizabeth favoured the carrot over the stick whenever possible. In addition she held a deep and unshakeable regard for learning and was determined to see Oxford back in the vanguard of European scholarship after so many decades in the wilderness of religious upheaval.* She had a captive audience of some seventeen hundred students—all of whom had elected to remain at the university despite the term being officially over—and if any queen knew how to entrance an audience it was Elizabeth.34

So Edmund Campion won his court patronage. George Coriat won half a sovereign. Tobie Matthew of Christ Church won the coveted title of Queen’s Scholar, which led to a lifetime of royal preferment and his eventual appointment as Archbishop of York. And all of them won the lavish praise and attention of a queen acutely conscious that her visit needed to serve as a fast-acting panacea for the ills afflicting Oxford. There was banqueting each evening and boisterous theatre in Christ Church’s Great Hall, transformed for the occasion into a gleaming, golden ‘Roman palace’. And then there was Elizabeth’s own speech, given at the church of St Mary the Virgin before the entire university on the final evening of her stay—a speech delivered in faultless, eloquent Latin, a speech in honour of Oxford and of academia, a speech that was welcomed and applauded with unqualified enthusiasm.

As Elizabeth rode out of Oxford the following day, surrounded once again by her glittering procession and by a city liberally hung with verses expressing grief at her departure, she had done much to heal the old wounds left by her father and her brother’s brutal and bullish enforcement of religious change. Her leave-taking was as sincere as it was warm: ‘Farewell, the worthy University of Oxford; farewell, my good subjects there; farewell, my dear Scholars, and pray God prosper your studies.’ Few could have done better under the circumstances. The only problem was it had all taken place several years too late.

Five years before Elizabeth’s visit a twenty-nine-year-old Lancastrian, a one-time student of Oriel College and former principal of St Mary’s Hall, had left Oxford for Flanders and the Low Countries. There, he was a welcome addition to the exiles of Louvain. And there, just seven years later, at the university town of Douai in the province of Artois, he would rent a ‘large…and very convenient’ house from where he would attempt to turn the ebbing fortunes of English Catholicism. ‘We cannot’, he would later write, ‘wait for better times; we must act now (to make them better).’ If the recalcitrant students of Oxford were to be summarily expelled from college whenever Europe threatened and if the men and women of England were to continue compromising their salvation in the name of political survival, then Dr William Allen had found the answer: use the former to educate the latter. It was a simple solution and it would prove devastatingly effective.35

* When Thomas Cromwell was made Chancellor of Cambridge in 1535, on the execution of Cardinal John Fisher, Oxford graduates saw Government preferment steered past them towards the students of Cambridge.

* Each college was provided at its foundation with an external ‘visitor’—part trouble-shooting ombudsman, part spiritual inquisitor.

* De Feria believed that the leading Catholics, in both the Commons and the Lords, had failed to put up a convincing fight during the crucial parliamentary debates from which the settlement sprang. However the Catholics were also under-represented in these debates: ten out of the twenty-six bishoprics were empty when Parliament opened on 25 January.

* Mrs Williams of the Swan was more than usually defiant in receiving Catholic priests: her husband was a justice of the peace and a city alderman.

* England’s sense of growing isolation from the rest of Europe, in spite of these entanglements, features strongly in the State Papers of the time. The Spanish ambassador reported back to Philip II a speech made by Sir William Cecil to the House of Commons in 1563, in which Cecil declared, ‘They had no one now to trust but themselves, for the Germans, although they had promised the Queen great things, had done nothing and had broken their word.’

* She is depicted as such in the Rainbow Portrait of c.1600 and was the subject of Walter Ralegh’s Book of the Ocean to Cynthia, in which he describes the anguished nature of his relationship with the Queen.

† Cecil’s own choice of suitably non-controversial debating matter for the week ahead was ‘Why is ophthalmia catching, but not dropsy or gout?’

* At the start of the sixteenth century Erasmus had placed English learning second only to that found in the Italian universities. Elizabeth’s concern over the standard of education in England extended as far as exempting schoolmasters from paying tax.