But Pius had achieved what Protestant Parliamentarians had so far only dreamed of. In showing that a strict adherence to the Catholic faith was now mutually incompatible with loyalty to Elizabeth, he had bound Anglicanism to Englishness more firmly than ever. And he had given to an anxious English nation the cast-iron proof that the more devout the Catholic, the more danger they presented to the realm. The problem for England’s Catholics was that as the roots of Elizabeth’s new Church began to take hold, the only active Catholics left in the country were, perforce, devout ones. When Edwin Sandys, Bishop of London, opened the Parliamentary session of 1571 with a sermon at Westminster Abbey warning ‘This liberty, that men may openly profess diversity of religion, must needs be dangerous’, he revealed just how important to the nation’s sense of security a solid connection between Church and State had become. He continued, ‘One God, one king, one faith, one profession is fit for one Monarchy and Commonwealth. Division weakeneth.’4
Paranoia ran rife throughout the 1570s, stalking through the courts of Europe, trailing terror and swift acts of bloody reprisal in its wake. In 1572 some two thousand French Protestants were slaughtered by their Catholic countrymen in Paris on St Bartholomew’s Eve, an act that imprinted itself indelibly upon the consciousness of every European Protestant; the French Catholics responsible claimed they had attacked only because they thought they were about to be murdered themselves. Continent-wide, an epidemic of fear and suspicion was spreading. The ideological gulf between Catholicism and Protestantism had reached unparalleled proportions. For the Protestants, the sight of a renewed and invigorated Catholic Church—leaner and keener since the Council of Trent had given it a much needed shake-up—lent substance to the rumours that the Catholics were regrouping for a crusading attack against them.* For the Catholics, meanwhile, the consolidation of the Protestant position only increased the fear that this insidious spread of revolutionary thought would continue, destroying the traditional structure of the civilized world and consigning everyone in it to the fires of hell. Not surprisingly there was little room for compromise. The very words ‘Papist’ and ‘Heretic’ carried sufficient emotional charge to unite one side in loathing of the other.5
To come of age in the 1570s, like John Gerard in Lancashire and Nicholas Owen in Oxford, was to grow to awareness in the uneasy stillness that heralds a distant but inevitable storm. And picked out brightly against the decade’s darkening sky was a series of events, the intervals between which might be counted out like the silence between lightning and thunder to show how fast the storm was approaching.
Early in 1573 a package of letters from the Continent fell into the hands of Bishop Edwin Sandys. Sandys dispatched a party of royal messengers—the ominously named pursuivants—to bring in the intended recipients, and the pursuivants took the well-trodden road to Oxford.† 6
There, they rounded up a handful of students for questioning, but one of the names on their list was missing: Cuthbert Mayne, a West Countryman and member of St John’s College, was away visiting relatives. Friends quickly passed word to the student that it would be unwise for him to return to university and soon Mayne found himself boarding a ship off the coast of Cornwall and sailing for Flanders and the English College at Douai.7
Over the next few years many more packages arrived in Oxford. Their contents were identical—invitations, from one friend to another, to join the growing fraternity of students overseas—and their summonses were answered by vast numbers of Oxford’s disaffected undergraduates. Such was the siren call of Douai.
Then, in 1574, just a year after Mayne’s hurried departure to the Continent, four other young Englishmen—one a former fellow of Mayne’s old college, St John’s—made a second and even more significant Channel crossing. Their names were Lewis Barlow, Martin Nelson, Thomas Metham and Henry Shaw. They were recent graduates of the Douai College and all were newly ordained Catholic priests. Their journey took them from the Low Countries back home again, in secret, to England. Dr William Allen’s solution had been put in motion.8
The English College of the University of Douai, William Allen’s brainchild, was born out of frustration. Allen had departed Oxford in 1561 refusing to swear the Oath of Supremacy required of him by the university authorities, and his flight had taken him as far as the University of Louvain in the Low Countries. There he discovered a flourishing community of English exiles living in two large houses, to which they had given the names Oxford and Cambridge and from which they released a stream of anti-Protestant publications to be smuggled back to England. Allen set to work with a will. When ill health forced him to return home in the summer of 1562, he found among the leaderless English Catholics a religious apathy in stark contrast to the vigour of Louvain.9
For the next two and a half years Allen toured England, trying single-handedly, but with isolated success, to communicate a sense of Louvain’s vitality to his friends. His dismay at their complacency and their willingness to compromise grew steadily all the while. The Pope’s recent ruling that Catholics should not attend Church of England services had been widely ignored. Those ‘who believed the faith in their hearts and heard mass at home when they could’ were still frequenting their local parish churches, heedless of the dangers of this ‘damnable sin of schism’, wrote Allen. No matter how they blamed the Government’s laws for ‘their unlawful acts’, England’s Catholics were heading for ‘the miserable abyss of destruction’. Elizabeth’s policy seemed to be working: the old religion was dying by degrees—and not through persecution but through isolation and lack of spiritual guidance. Indeed, it was a measure of the Government’s live and let live policy at the time that Allen was permitted to remain so long in England, given his efforts to persuade his friends to break the law. But by the spring of 1565, aware that the Government’s patience was not to be tried indefinitely and worn down by the Sisyphean nature of his chosen task, Allen departed for Louvain once more. There the situation at home continued to haunt him. The remedy, though, proved elusive.10
Then in the autumn of 1567 Allen travelled to Rome in search of a position as chaplain to the English Hospice there. The opening did not materialize and he set off back to Flanders, accompanied by his friend Dr Jean Vendeville of the University of Douai. Vendeville had just failed to persuade Pope Pius to support his proposal for a crusade against the Turks, but the two friends’ conversation over the course of their journey north delivered up an answer to their respective disappointments: couple Vendeville’s thwarted missionary zeal with Allen’s desire to save England’s wavering Catholics. So began the ‘oasis in the wilderness of exile’.11
Within a few weeks of its opening, on 29 September 1568, Vendeville was writing that the new English College boasted a handful of men ‘of great ability and promise’. And from the start the Douai seminary looked very much like being an Oxford affair. Among its first members were John Marshall, former Dean of Christ Church College, Richard Bristow, MA of Christ Church and fellow of Exeter College, and Edward Rishton, MA of Exeter College. Only one of the new English students, John White, was not an Oxford man.12
What news of this reached Oxford? What shape did the rumours take as quickly and quietly they spread about the town? That William Allen had founded a college where exiled scholars ‘might live and study together more profitably than apart’? That he was preparing a school of men ‘to restore religion when the proper moment should