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

to be made to the Pope’s right to depose a monarch from their throne. William Allen was training his students ‘so that they may serve the one side without offence to the other, which is the hardest thing in the world where the two contrary parties be man and God’. His solution was single-minded. No matter how sullied his own reputation was fast becoming, his missionaries-in-training would be political virgins. It was a theoretical distinction that might have made perfect sense in the classroom; what was less certain was whether it could ever make perfect sense in the outside world, particularly in England. Allen might have trained his students in the art of disputation, he might have schooled them in the scriptures, he might have fired them up with a hatred of heresy and inured them to physical pain. But he was sending them into a country whose Queen stood under sentence of deposition from the very Church they represented, and the only protection he had given them, their only defence against the charge of being agitators and secret agents, was that they had not been allowed to discuss politics during their training. More useful would have been detailed discussions about the realities of the political situation into which they were about to be dropped, about the theological doubts concerning Pope Pius’ right to depose the Queen, about the impossibility of separating religion from politics in a country whose Church was a construct of Parliament. Had Allen’s holy warriors been equipped to live for the cause or simply to die for it?* As they left the safe confines of Douai for the cold and treacherous waters of their homeland the answer would soon become apparent.²⁸

      On the night of 24 April 1576 the thirty-two-year-old Cuthbert Mayne, newly ordained into the Catholic Church, made the short Channel crossing to England, one of eighteen Douai graduates to make the journey that year. At daybreak he stepped ashore on the south coast, home again after an absence of three years. He was supplied with letters of introduction to the Catholic Sir Francis Tregian of Golden House in Cornwall, so, after taking leave of his fellow missionary John Payne, he set off for the West Country.²⁹

      The journey was long and nerve-racking as Mayne tried to avoid the ever present shire watches on the lookout for vagabonds and agitators. To be stopped meant to be questioned and to be questioned meant putting his cover story to unwelcome scrutiny.

      Keeping well to the south of Barnstaple, near which he had been born and where he was certain of being recognized, Mayne arrived at last at Golden House. Here, in his new disguise as the Tregian family’s steward, he began working as William Allen had trained him, travelling the Tregian estates between Truro and Launceston, saying mass for the faithful and reconciling to the Church any who had faltered. Summer turned peacefully to autumn. In December that year news filtered slowly through the country of the Queen’s clash with her new Archbishop of Canterbury and her displeasure at his Puritan leanings. Christmas and Easter were celebrated at Golden House with full Catholic ceremony. Spring turned to summer. On 8 June 1577 Cuthbert Mayne was sitting in the gardens of Golden House when a party of some one hundred men rode into view. At their head was the new High Sheriff of Cornwall, Richard Grenville, a ruthless naval adventurer with no love of Catholicism. Mayne rose quietly from his seat and left the garden ‘where he might have gone from them’, heading for his room.³⁰

      But Grenville was acting on inside information: ‘the first place they went unto was M. Mayne’s chamber, which being fast shut, they bounced and beat at the door. M. Mayne came and opened it’. To Grenville’s question ‘What art thou?’ Mayne answered simply ‘I am a man’. But when Grenville ripped open Mayne’s doublet he found about his neck an Agnus Dei case. Agnus Deis were small wax discs made from the Easter candles, impressed with an image of the paschal lamb and blessed by the Pope. They had been outlawed by Parliament in 1571. The penalty for possessing one was death. Among Mayne’s papers was found a copy of a papal bull, issued by Pope Pius’s successor, Gregory XIII. These, too, had been outlawed by Parliament in 1571, in response to Pius’s Bull Regnans. To bring any papal bull into the country was now a treasonable offence. So Cuthbert Mayne, former fellow of St John’s College, Oxford and graduate of William Allen’s seminary, was arrested and borne triumphantly away, first to Truro and then to the dank, underground castle gaol at Launceston.³¹

      At the Michaelmas Assizes, Mayne was led out before Sir Roger Marwood, Chief Baron of the Exchequer, and indicted on five counts, the most serious being the obtaining of a papal bull and the publishing of that bull in England. The sentence was death for high treason. It mattered little that the papal bull had expired, had no bearing on English affairs and had not in fact been distributed by Mayne since his arrival in England; Mayne claimed he had only brought it with him by mistake. It mattered less that the judges themselves were worried by the verdict and sent urgently to the Council for advice on how to proceed. The Council was by now extremely concerned by the reports it was receiving from its spies of an influx of Douai graduates into the country—some thirty priests had arrived home since the return of the first four pioneers in 1574—and was in no mood for mercy. The sentence stood.³²

      Then on the morning of 29 November Mayne was offered his life. If he would swear on the Bible that Elizabeth was the supreme head of the Church of England he would be spared execution. Mayne refused. He went further: he reasserted his belief that England would soon be restored to the Catholic faith by the ‘secret instructors’ from Douai. And then, sealing his fate (and stepping outside the strictly apolitical role being claimed by Allen for his students), he declared that should ‘any Catholic prince…invade any realm to reform the same to the authority of the See of Rome, that then the Catholics in that realm…should be ready to assist and help them’. The offer of a reprieve was rescinded.³³

Cuthbert Mayne was ‘drawn a quarter of a mile to the place of execution, and when he was to be laid on the sled, some of the Justices moved the Sheriff’s deputy, that he would cause him to have his head laid over the car, that it might be dashed against the stones in drawing, and M. Mayne offered himself that it might be so, but the Sheriff’s deputy would not suffer it’. This sheriff’s deputy was a merciful man. He let Mayne hang until he was dead before disembowelling him, quartering him, and distributing his parts about the county for display. For his role in the affair, Sir Francis Tregian was sentenced to life imprisonment and his estates were seized and given to Sir George Carey, a cousin of the Queen.* John Stow, in his Chronicle of that year, recorded: ‘Cuthbert Maine [sic] was drawn, hanged and quartered at Launceston, in Cornwall, for preferring Roman power.’³⁴

      Cuthbert Mayne had become the Douai seminary’s first martyr. When his old master at Oxford learned of his death he exclaimed, ‘Wretch that I am, how has that novice distanced me! May he be favourable to his old friend and tutor! I shall now boast of these titles more than ever.’ Such was the power of dying for your faith, and not even the fact that Mayne had been executed as a traitor to his country could tarnish this. Yes, he had broken existing treason laws, but did anyone seriously believe that owning an out-of-date copy of a nondescript bull and a few wax discs posed a threat to national security?³⁵

      However, as the dust settled on Mayne’s quartered remains and the political post-mortem began, it was soon clear that neither side had won a decisive victory in this opening skirmish. Catholics could claim that Cuthbert Mayne was a traitor only according to the most rigid set of definitions, in regard to his possession of a papal bull, or on the basis of hypothesis alone, in regard to his attitude towards Catholic invasions. But in regard to that same attitude, the English Government could claim that Allen’s supposed political virgins were uncommonly quick to pronounce on matters apart from their faith. Blessed martyr of a persecuted Church, or secret agent of an enemy state? Cuthbert Mayne had become all things to all men. His foolishness in being caught with Agnus Deis and a papal bull, and his clumsy defence of the Pope’s powers of deposition had left