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

The Society of Jesus was a new religious order, founded in 1540 by a Spanish ex-soldier called Ignatius Loyola, with the specific aim of converting the heathen and reconciling the lapsed. Loyola dreamed of countering the rise of Protestantism and restoring the Catholic Church to its former pre-eminence in Europe. To this end he had brought all his army training to bear on the problem in hand: ‘I have never left the army,’ he explained, ‘I have only been seconded to the service of God.’ His Jesuits operated as a tightly knit organization bound by a rigid, even military discipline, and Gerard, who used his time at the college to continue his studies, was quickly impressed by the elite band of priests who taught him. When illness forced him to return to England in the spring of 1583, he spent his convalescence disposing of his property and possessions in preparation for a new life among them. 23

His difficulty came in leaving the country for a second time. To leave England without State permission was a crime according to English law. To leave England to train as a Catholic priest was still worse a crime, the effects of which were often felt by the criminal’s family in his absence. Gerard chose to leave the country without a licence. With a party of other Catholics, all heading abroad with intentions similar to his own, he set sail from Gravesend early in November 1583. The weather was against them. After five days at sea, making heavy progress into strong winds, they were forced to put in to Dover. At Dover it was revealed they had a spy in their company when the entire party was arrested by customs officers and sent up to London for questioning. The spy, Thomas Dodwell, reported back to the Privy Council how the group had bribed ‘Raindall, the [officer] of Gravesend, [who] receiveth money of passengers, suffering them to pass without searching.’ 24

While his companions were imprisoned, the nineteen-year-old Gerard (whose cousin Sir Gilbert Gerard was Master of the Rolls and held some sway with the Government) was taken into custody first by his uncle, George Hastings, brother to the Earl of Huntingdon, then by the Bishop of London. Both men set about encouraging Gerard to convert to the Protestant faith. Both men failed. It was a measure of his strength of will that the teenager held out against the arguments of his two more powerful opponents, with the threat of imprisonment, and worse, hanging over his head. But whatever fear Gerard might have felt, he left the Bishop of London’s palace for prison still protesting his Catholicism. 25

John Gerard was committed to the Marshalsea prison in Southwark on 5 March 1584. His year-long imprisonment was spent in the heady company of like-minded rebels against the nationalized Church: laymen and women arrested for their refusal to attend Protestant services and a number of priests awaiting execution. It was an intoxicating education. When at last his friends were able to secure his release from prison, in return for paid guarantees that he would not leave the country, his desire to become a Jesuit burnt fiercer than ever. At the end of May 1586 his chance came. An old friend of his, Anthony Babington, agreed to stand bail for him if he failed to appear before the authorities at the next quarter and John Gerard escaped to France. He was twenty-one. 26

From France, Gerard travelled south to Italy, where he entered the English College of Rome, the companion school to Dr William Allen’s successful Reims institution. By now his general eagerness to become a priest had transformed itself into the specific ambition of becoming a priest on the English mission. Pope Sixtus V granted him dispensation to take his holy orders early, some months short of the statutory age. The Society of Jesus agreed to admit him into their ranks as a novice and let him finish his training as he worked. And at last, on 15 August 1588, John Gerard became a Jesuit priest in the company of Edward Oldcorne. He was ready to return home. 27

Throughout late August and all of September, as the Armada fleet underwent its grim circumnavigation of the British Isles and rumour ran unchecked through the courts of Europe, Gerard and Oldcorne travelled north towards England, accompanied by two other priests. ‘Passing through Switzerland,’ Gerard wrote, ‘we stayed a night at Basle and decided to see the old Catholic buildings of the town: the Lutherans usually leave them intact but the Calvinists destroy them.’ At Reims, he noted, ‘we passed incognito’: the seminary city was full of spies. In Paris a prisoner in one of the city gaols calling himself Jacques Colerdin learned of their arrival. On 1 October Colerdin was able to scribble a letter to Sir Francis Walsingham in London, telling him that ‘There be 8 Priests over from Rome, whereof John Gerard…will be in England within five days.’ Colerdin, who described himself to the Archbishop of Paris as ‘an English priest and Bachelor in Theology’ in a petition he wrote seeking his release, was a Government informer. *His real name was Gilbert Gifford. He was, indeed, a Catholic priest, but since his arrest as an alleged accomplice in the Babington Plot he had found it prudent to switch sides in the religious conflict. †Now he was well placed to point out his fellow seminarians to the English authorities. 28

From Paris, Gerard and Oldcorne continued on to Eu, some miles north of Dieppe, in preparation for crossing the Channel. But here they received unwelcome news from England. ‘The Spanish Fleet’, wrote Gerard, ‘had exasperated the people against the Catholics; everywhere a hunt was being organised for Catholics and their houses searched; in every village and along all the roads and lanes very close watches were kept to catch them.’ Clearly conditions at home were far from ideal for them to attempt a landing in secret and for the next few weeks the pair were forced to kick their heels on the French coast, while their superiors back in Rome decided what should be done. At last a letter came through: ‘we were free’, wrote Gerard, ‘either to go ahead with the enterprise or stay back until things in England had quietened down. This was the answer we desired.’ Immediately, the two men set about finding a ship. 29

As John Gerard stood in the shadows of a Norfolk wood choosing the best and safest route to London, he had already committed treason, according to England’s latest laws. The act of 1585 ‘against Jesuits, seminary priests and such other like disobedient persons’, one of nine pieces of parliamentary legislation during Elizabeth’s reign to seek to redefine treachery in the face of a newly perceived menace, employed bully-boy language to make its point. Any Englishman ordained a Catholic priest since June 1559 would, the act threatened, soon find out ‘how dangerous it shall be for them…once to put their foot on land within any of her Majesty’s dominions’. In returning home, in stepping from his ship’s boat onto a Norfolk beach, John Gerard had become a traitor to his country. If caught, he would be punished accordingly. As he left the wood, heading westwards, he was spotted by a group of men walking towards him. * 30

Gerard takes up the story:

‘Walking boldly up to them I asked whether they knew anything about a stray hawk; perhaps they had heard its bell tinkling as it was flying around. I wanted them to believe that I had lost my bird and was wandering about the countryside in search of it [then] they would not be surprised because I was a stranger here and unfamiliar with the lanes and countryside; they would merely think that I had wandered here in my search…They told me they had not seen or heard a falcon recently and they seemed sorry that they could not put me on its track. So with a disappointed look I went off as if I were going to search for it in the trees and hedges round about.’ 31