‘And better it were that they should suffer, than that her highness
or commonwealth should shake or be in danger.’
(Device for the Alteration of Religion, 1558)
TO THE NORTH OF the city of London, beyond the walls and the great gates, Moorgate and Aldersgate (Aldgate), lay the lordship of Finsbury and Finsbury Fields. Once used as a site for archery tournaments and wrestling matches, by 1588 the fields had fallen victim to urban sprawl. Contemporary commentator John Stow complained ‘there is now made a continual building throughout of garden houses and small cottages’.1
A description of one of these cottages remains. The ground floor contained a kitchen and a dining room. The first floor was given over to a chapel that doubled at night as a sleeping loft. The cellar beneath held sufficient storage space for logs, coal and beer barrels. And behind the carefully piled provisions was a hiding place with room for six or seven men. In the autumn of 1588 this small, three-roomed cottage served as the London headquarters of the Jesuit mission to England.2
It was here that John Gerard made his way towards the end of November, as the first snows of an unseasonably bitter winter blanketed the country. Gerard recorded his journey south in perfunctory style—‘there was no incident on the way’—and for the length of time it took him to appear in London he gave no explanation. But there was one man to whom an explanation was owing: the man who had sent for him.3
Father Henry Garnet was thirty-three, cheerful, scholarly, the son of a Nottingham grammar school master. Unlike Gerard, Garnet’s family had conformed to Elizabeth’s nationalized Church after 1559. In Nottingham and those parts of Derbyshire bordering the city there had been little opposition to the change in religion. Then in 1567 Garnet won a scholarship to Winchester School and there he came under a more Catholic influence. Winchester was among the last of the schools to accept the new faith. In 1561 the then headmaster had been arrested for his refusal to conform to Protestantism. In protest the boys had boycotted the school chapel, locking themselves in their dormitories and accusing the replacement headmaster of destroying ‘the souls of the innocents’. The military commander of Portsmouth Harbour was called to break up the strike and a dozen boys were expelled soon afterwards. It was into this world of Catholic defiance and classical scholarship that the twelve-year-old Henry Garnet was soon immersed.4
Avoiding the usual passage from Winchester to New College, Oxford (by now he was no longer prepared to pretend to be a Protestant) Garnet headed for London to become ‘corrector for the press’ at Richard Tottel’s printworks in Temple Bar. He was in London in June 1573 for the execution of Thomas Wodehouse at Smithfield. Wodehouse had the unhappy distinction of being the first Catholic priest to be executed in London under Elizabeth; more than that, he was rumoured to have joined the Society of Jesus while a prisoner.* In the summer of 1575 Henry Garnet left London for Rome to join the Jesuits himself.5
Garnet’s return to England in July 1586 was followed with uncomfortable swiftness by his promotion to Superior of the English Jesuits just a couple of weeks later, after the arrest of the man under whom he had come to serve. The death of Campion still hung albatross-like around the neck of the Jesuit mission; moreover, it seemed those destined to pay the price for that death were not Campion’s killers, but the men struggling to follow in his footsteps. In the six years between Campion and Persons’ first landing and Garnet’s arrival the Jesuits had failed to establish a permanent bridgehead in England. Aborted attempt had followed aborted attempt. And now with the threat of the Spanish Armada drawing nearer, Garnet’s own efforts to revive the mission seemed destined to flounder in the wave of anti-Catholic feeling sweeping over the country.
Garnet’s first action as Jesuit Superior had been to write to Rome for more men to be hurried over to help him. In the spring of Armada year he was informed that reinforcements—in the shape of John Gerard and Edward Oldcorne—would soon be on their way. So as the events of 1588 unfolded about him Garnet prepared for their coming, choosing the cottage in Finsbury as a base for the mission, for ‘since it was believed that no one was actually residing there, it was never molested by the officers whose duty it is to make the rounds of every house to enquire whether the inmates are in the habit of attending the [Protestant] church’. He was in London to witness the spate of executions that took place that autumn, as post-Armada relief gave way to bloodlust and revenge. In all, seventeen priests, nine Catholic laymen and one woman were executed over a three-month period. The one woman to be killed, Margaret Ward, was charged with supplying the priest William Watson with a rope to escape from the Bridewell prison—sympathetic onlookers claimed that as she climbed to her death they could see she was ‘crippled and half-paralysed’ by torture. Elizabeth, herself, was said to have been appalled by Ward’s death and ‘it was for that reason that recently she pardoned two other women who had borne themselves before the tribunal with singular courage’, wrote Garnet in October. Two months later Garnet was in the crowds to watch Elizabeth’s triumphal procession to St Paul’s Cathedral to give thanks for England’s victory. And throughout this time still he waited for news of Gerard and Oldcorne’s safe arrival.6
There are few details of Gerard’s meeting with Garnet in Finsbury that winter—Gerard himself is significantly quiet on the subject—but the following March Garnet wrote to Claudio Aquaviva, Jesuit General since the death of Everard Mercurian in 1581. His letter is characteristically cryptic, but in it he mentions ‘that without consulting me at all [Gerard] did things which [he] had no authority to do and which manifestly [he] should never have done’. During his brief stay in Norfolk it seemed not only had Gerard freely dispensed spiritual guidance and religious pardons, but he had also passed information—probably details of the privileges granted by the Pope to the English Jesuits—to ‘certain priests who, during their time in Rome, were not considered well disposed to us’. With memories of priests-turned-informers like Charles Sledd and Gilbert Gifford still fresh in mind, such an action was risky at best. At worst it threatened to destroy the mission. And although Garnet concluded his letter ‘It is not a serious matter but it might have been’, it must have seemed to him now that his new recruit was uncommonly confident in his own abilities and apparently lacking in discipline. It was not an auspicious start.7
Before Christmas the fourth and final Jesuit priest on the mission arrived back in Finsbury from a tour of the country.* Robert Southwell was twenty-seven years old, the son of an old East Anglian family. His grandfather had been one of the commissioners for the dissolution of the monasteries, his mother had been a childhood companion of the then Princess Elizabeth and his father was a prominent courtier. Among his more important relations were Lord Burghley, Sir Francis Bacon and the Attorney General, Sir Edward Coke. Southwell’s family serves as a particularly colourful reminder of just how few assumptions can be made about the religious complexion of England at this period.8
Southwell left home for the English College at Douai in the summer of 1576, aged fourteen. In November that year he moved to the Jesuit College of Cleremont near Paris and in the spring of 1578 he applied to join the Society of Jesus. Political upheavals in the Spanish Netherlands and an initial rejection by the Society on the grounds of his youth meant it was not