Thomas Pound was delighted to receive his new guest. He introduced Persons to a young man named Edward Brookesby who also happened to be visiting the prison that day and soon Persons was following Brookesby to a house on Fetter or Chancery Lane. The Jesuit’s luck had returned.21
Secrecy surrounded this house in the city. It was said to have belonged to Adam Squire, the Bishop of London’s son-in-law and London’s chief pursuivant, but by 1580 it had become the rented headquarters of a group of ‘young gentlemen of great zeal’, each one dedicated ‘to advance and assist the setting forward of God’s cause and religion…every man offering himself, his person, his ability, his friends, and whatsoever God had lent him besides, to the service of the cause’. This band of enthusiastic young Catholics (of which Edward Brooksby was one) was led by George Gilbert, a man already known to Robert Persons.22
Gilbert was a twenty-eight-year-old Suffolk man of enormous independent wealth, an accomplished athlete, horseman and swordsman.* He had been raised a strict Puritan but in Paris, where he had proved a great favourite at the French court, he had come under the spell of Catholicism. From Paris he travelled to Rome where, with religious instruction from Robert Persons, his confessor at St Peter’s Basilica, Gilbert converted to the old faith. On his return to England in 1579 he began to gather about him a group of like-minded and equally wealthy young Englishmen, ready to devote their energies ‘to the common support of Catholics’. Charles Arundel, Charles Basset (a descendant of Sir Thomas More), Edward Habington, Edward and Francis Throckmorton, Anthony Babington, Henry Vaux, William Tresham and John Stonor: all would give time and money to further the Catholic cause; several would give their lives. To what degree they had already begun working together as a secret society is the subject of dispute, but with Robert Persons’ arrival in London their enthusiasm now found new focus.23
Once settled in George Gilbert’s city headquarters, Persons began ‘to acquire a number of friends and to arrange with inns, with a view to staying in the country for a few days’. Then, with Gilbert’s aid and an escort to accompany him, Persons left London to ‘employ himself in the best manner he could to the comfort of Catholics’.24
Meanwhile, in St Omer, Edmund Campion had received Persons’ letter and was preparing for his own crossing to England. On the evening of 24 June the summer storms that had battered the Channel coastline for days finally let up and the waiting was over. Disguised as Persons’ jewel merchant friend and with Ralph Emerson acting as his servant, Edmund Campion set sail from Calais.25
At daybreak the following morning the port of Dover stood at red alert. Word had reached the Council that Gabriel Allen, William Allen’s brother, was returning to England to visit his family in Lancashire. Edmund Campion bore more than a passing resemblance to the wanted man. Campion and Emerson were dragged before the Mayor of Dover, cross-examined, then informed they were to be sent to London for further questioning. Then, for no obvious reason, the mayor changed his mind. Quickly, the two men left Dover, riding north to the Thames estuary before boarding a boat that took them upriver to the capital.26
Reaching London, they were still in some doubt as to what they should do next. Then a man detached himself from the waiting crowd at the quayside and stepped forward to greet them, saying, ‘Mr Edmunds, give me your hand; I stay here for you to lead you to your friends.’ The man’s name was Thomas James. He was a member of George Gilbert’s brotherhood of young Catholics and for several days now he had been keeping watch for the two men’s arrival. By nightfall Campion and Emerson were safely installed at Gilbert’s headquarters.27
On 6 April 1580, while Persons and General Mercurian discussed the details of their forthcoming mission and Campion hurried from Prague to Rome to join them, an earthquake hit London and the southern counties of England. ‘The great clock bell in the palace at Westminster strake of itself against the hammer with the shaking of the earth.’ Stones tumbled from St Paul’s Cathedral. In Newgate an apprentice was killed by falling church masonry. Meanwhile, at Sandwich in Kent the sea ‘foamed…so that the ships tottered’ and at Dover ‘a piece of the cliff fell into the sea’.28
In the weeks and months that followed, strange visions appeared in the skies above Cornwall, Somerset and Wiltshire—ghostly castles and fleets of ships, three companies of men all dressed in black, a pack of hounds whose cry was so convincing it drew men from their houses in readiness for the chase. In Northumberland hailstones rained down in the shape of frogs, swords, crosses and, worse, the ‘skulls of dead men’. And in Yorkshire and Huntingdonshire strange births were reported, monstrous creatures part human, part beast, to signify ‘our monstrous life’, wrote Holinshed, who chronicled the year with a baleful gloom. The arrival of the Jesuits, like the arrival of the Spanish eight years later, was preceded by many ominous portents (not surprisingly, perhaps, when the prevailing view among William Allen’s circle was that ‘two Jesuits should do more than the whole army of Spain’).29
And with the coming of these portents, the fear that had haunted the nation throughout the preceding decade grew stronger still. A future war with Catholic Europe now seemed a foregone conclusion. It was really only a matter of when and, specifically, with whom that war would be fought. Would it be with the Pope, who was already sending invasion forces to Ireland? With the Spanish, who seemed invincible? Or, closer to home still, with Scotland? In 1578 the pro-English and Protestant Regent to the Scottish throne, the Earl of Morton, had been forced to resign. Now the country was ruled jointly by the Earl of Arran and Esmé Stuart, the boy-king James VI’s favourite cousin, both of whom were pro-Catholic, pro-Mary and, worst of all, pro-French. Wherever you looked as an Englishman in 1580, to all points of the compass and to the very skies above your head, there were signs to trouble the bravest of souls. And set beside these general fears of imminent conflict was the more specific fear that while eyes and minds had been otherwise distracted England’s Catholics had been growing stronger.30
At the close of the 1570s the Spanish ambassador reported home to Philip II that ‘The number of Catholics, thank God, is daily increasing here [in England], owing to the college and seminary for Englishmen which your Majesty ordered to be supported in Douai.’ If this was designed to flatter, soon there were other reports flying backwards and forwards supporting the ambassador’s claim. Henry Shaw, one of Allen’s four proto-missionaries, wrote back to his mentor, ‘The number of Catholics increases so abundantly on all sides, that he who almost alone holds the rudder of state [Sir William Cecil?] had privately admitted to one of his friends that for one staunch Catholic at the beginning of the reign there were now, he knew for certain, ten.’ From Warwickshire the Earl of Leicester wrote to Sir William Cecil in alarm, to ‘assure your Lordship, since Queen Mary’s time, the Papists were never in that jollity they be at this present time in the country’. Meanwhile, the new Bishop of London, John Aylmer, warned Sir Francis Walsingham ‘that the Papists do marvellously increase, both in number and in obstinate withdrawing of themselves from the Church and service of God’.* A nationwide census of convicted recusants, drawn up in 1577, offered the shocking proof that there was not a diocese in England that did not contain a number of Catholics steadfastly