Loyalty to Elizabeth carried with it the promise of advancement in a country crying out for new priests for its newest Church. It might also be a path to high office in the service of a queen looking to employ ‘men meaner in substance, and younger in years’ in her Government, in place of those ambitious aristocrats dismissive of a female ruler and powerful enough to challenge her. Loyalty to Elizabeth was something Elizabeth herself, with her charm, her flirtatiousness and her calculated displays of majesty, was most keen to encourage—not surprisingly given the vulnerability of her throne.15
Loyalty to your conscience, on the other hand, led to certain ruin: to separation from friends, estrangement from family and crippling poverty—just as the nation’s economy began to stabilize. A letter home from one young Englishman who chose conscience over country illustrated the emotional and financial cost of his decision: ‘Pray crave my parents’ blessing for me, and confer with my mother, and ascertain whether if I should come home, it would turn my father to me.’ And, he added desperately: ‘my wants are very great. Pray be a means to them [my parents] to help me’. Another letter, this time from the exiled Thomas, Lord Copley, uncle to the Jesuit-poet Robert Southwell, set out the price of conscience clearer still: ‘I love my country, friends, and kinsfolk, but I must be content patiently to forbear the comfort of them all, as I am taught by our Saviour himself, rather than to forsake him’. And William Shakespeare, in his play Richard II of c.1595, would sum up the pains of exile in a couplet:
Then thus I turn me from my country’s light, To dwell in solemn shades of endless night.16
So why was any Oxford student prepared to make this sacrifice? Of course, for some it must always have been for the sheer excitement of going up against the Establishment. But it was one thing to attend secret mass at the Mitre Inn, to pass on in stolen whispers the latest news from Douai, to argue long into the night in the rarefied, ivoried, once-removed atmosphere of academia—quite another to go over to the other side altogether.
For John Gerard, his reason was that of tradition; perhaps, too, an unspoken need to settle an old score: ‘My parents had always been Catholics,’ he wrote, ‘and on that account had suffered much at the hands of an heretical government.’ (Curiously, his was a self-censored family history: his grandfather, Thomas Gerard, had been burnt at the stake at Smithfield in London on 30 July 1540, as a convert to Lutheranism.) In Gerard’s fellow Jesuit, Robert Southwell’s, case, Catholicism was ‘the belief which to all my friends by descent and pedigree is, in manner, hereditary’. But for numerous others—such as Cuthbert Mayne, raised by his uncle, a Protestant parson—the old faith was not their old faith. Rather, the ‘Old religion [had] renewed its youth’ from among the ranks of many families who had already forsaken it. Those students who chose to leave Oxford for Douai, to sacrifice a life of opportunity for one of danger and penury, did so on the basis of ideological certainty.17
For some, their certainty sprang from a conviction that Parliament, ‘which has not long used to judge causes of faith, or prescribe ecclesiastical laws’ (so wrote Lord Copley), had no mandate to tell them what to believe. Others, looking about them at the bloodshed and chaos, the failed harvests and famine that had so blighted England in the preceding decades, saw God’s hand at work—their country was being punished for the sin of challenging the established Church. For such students, on the brink of entering this world of bloodshed and chaos for themselves, here was a way of drawing its poison. In Robert Southwell’s words, it now became their ‘duty…by the gentleness of [their] manners, the fire of [their] charity, by innocence of life and an example of all virtues, so to shine upon the world as to lift up the Res Christiana that now droops so sadly, and to build up again from the ruins what others by their vices have brought so low’. Still more young undergraduates believed that England had been betrayed by its Government—a Government more concerned with its own immediate survival than with the salvation of the nation. Elizabeth herself might have learned the value of political compromise at a very early age; most Oxford students had never had that need and saw no reason to acquire it now—not with the souls of their countrymen at stake. Later they would be charged with betraying those same countrymen to Spain—their defence would be that the true betrayal had not been theirs, but had come many decades prior to them setting out for Douai.18
In a poem of 1581-5 Robert Southwell wrote:
Then crop the morning Rose while it is fair;
Our day is short, the evening makes it die.
Yield God the prime of youth ’ere it impair,
Lest he the dregs of crooked age deny.19
Whatever their motives for escaping to Douai, at William Allen’s disposal now was the prime of Oxford youth.
At first Allen did not envisage sending the graduates of his Douai seminary back home to England as missionaries; the impetus for this was Jean Vendeville’s and came later. Rather, he thought to prepare them for the happy moment—Elizabeth’s death or a foreign invasion—when England would again need Catholic priests. But the syllabus he devised for them was a blueprint training manual for a very specific kind of ‘holy war’.20
The students would remain at the college for three years. In that time they would learn Greek and Hebrew to augment their existing knowledge of Latin. With these three languages at their disposal they could read the scriptures in their original form, so as ‘to save them from being entangled in the sophisms which heretics extract from the properties and meanings of words’. They would study their Bibles with painstaking detail, working through the Old Testament at least twelve times and the New Testament sixteen times. And each week there would be debates in which the students would ‘defend in turn not only the Catholic side against the texts of Scripture alleged by the heretics, but also the heretical side against those which Catholics bring forward’. Thus armed, they would ‘all know better how to prove our doctrines by argument and to refute the contrary opinions’.
For the advanced students there would be a further course of study: English, the ‘vulgar tongue’. ‘In this respect’, wrote Allen, ‘the heretics, however ignorant they may be on other points, have the advantage over many of the more learned Catholics.’ The Protestants’ use of the Bible in translation gave them an advantage over Allen’s priests when preaching to those unschooled in Latin. English classes would correct the inaccuracy and ‘unpleasant hesitation’ with which many of his trainee missionaries interpreted their scriptures. And William Allen was preparing for a war in which any inaccuracy or hesitation could have devastating consequences.
It was to be a war of words and will in which the sharpest weapons would be the combatant’s ability to argue his cause clearly and persuasively, and his unwavering belief in the rightness of that cause. To this latter end it was Allen’s ‘first and foremost study’ to stir up ‘in the minds of Catholics, especially of those who are preparing here for the Lord’s work, a zealous and just indignation against the heretics’ and to set before ‘the eyes of the students the…utter desolation of all things sacred…the chief impieties, blasphemies, absurdities, cheats and trickeries of the English heretics’. ‘The result’, wrote Allen, ‘is that they not only hold the