Neither man had been long enough in Rome to forget the seeping chill of late October English rain. The bad weather that had so hampered the Armada had not abated and the year was ending with as cold a spell as it had begun. But the rain and the cold were the least of the two men’s worries as they now tried to put as much distance between them and the coast before dawn. In the dark it was impossible to pick a path that did not lead them up to a house instead of out into open fields. Twice, three times, a dog barked as they neared one of the fishermen’s cottages flanking the beach and hastily they retraced their steps. Finally, they headed into a nearby wood to take cover until first light. There, in whispers, they decided it would be safer to separate and each make his own way to London; that way, if one of them should be caught, the other still had a chance of reaching the capital undetected. As soon as it was light enough to see, the older of the two men, twenty-seven-year-old Edward Oldcorne, son of a Yorkshire bricklayer, made his way northwards out of the wood towards the town of Mundesley. On the road he fell in with a party of sailors, demobbed and returning home after the defeat of the Armada, and in their company and with the cover they unwittingly afforded him, he made his way to London.
Meanwhile, his companion was leaving the wood by a different path. John Gerard was twenty-four. He was born on 4 October 1564, the son of the prominent Lancashire landowner Sir Thomas Gerard, a former county sheriff.* At the age of five John Gerard was removed from his parents’ care when it was discovered his father was involved in a scheme to rescue the newly imprisoned Mary, Queen of Scots from Tutbury Castle in Staffordshire and restore her to the Scottish throne. Sir Thomas Gerard was arrested and held in the Tower of London until 1573. On his release he collected his eight-year-old son from the family of strangers on whom he had been forcibly billeted and returned with him to Lancashire, to Bryn Hall, the Gerards’ estate. Whatever the effect on John Gerard of being ripped from his home at so young an age, these events did little to persuade him to conform to the State Church. At the age of just twelve he was sent down from Exeter College, Oxford for refusing to attend a Protestant Easter service.21
In the summer of 1577 Gerard applied for, and received, a licence to travel abroad to study. For the next three years he attended lectures at Dr William Allen’s English College, first at the University of Douai in the Spanish Netherlands, then, when the college was expelled from there, at the University of Reims. Allen, an exiled Oxford academic, had opened the English College as a training school for those English boys still wishing to enter the Catholic priesthood, now that this was forbidden to them in their own country. The college also offered a thorough education to any English student unwilling to swear allegiance to the new Church of England, an oath required of all those graduating from the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. At Reims Gerard first came into contact with a member of the Society of Jesus, an English Jesuit named Lovel, and from Reims he travelled to Cleremont, the school of the French Jesuits near Paris, determined to join the Society himself. He was not yet sixteen.22
The Society of Jesus was a new religious order, founded in 1540 by a Spanish ex-soldier called Ignatius Loyola, with the specific aim of converting the heathen and reconciling the lapsed. Loyola dreamed of countering the rise of Protestantism and restoring the Catholic Church to its former pre-eminence in Europe. To this end he had brought all his army training to bear on the problem in hand: ‘I have never left the army,’ he explained, ‘I have only been seconded to the service of God.’ His Jesuits operated as a tightly knit organization bound by a rigid, even military discipline, and Gerard, who used his time at the college to continue his studies, was quickly impressed by the elite band of priests who taught him. When illness forced him to return to England in the spring of 1583, he spent his convalescence disposing of his property and possessions in preparation for a new life among them.23
His difficulty came in leaving the country for a second time. To leave England without State permission was a crime according to English law. To leave England to train as a Catholic priest was still worse a crime, the effects of which were often felt by the criminal’s family in his absence. Gerard chose to leave the country without a licence. With a party of other Catholics, all heading abroad with intentions similar to his own, he set sail from Gravesend early in November 1583. The weather was against them. After five days at sea, making heavy progress into strong winds, they were forced to put in to Dover. At Dover it was revealed they had a spy in their company when the entire party was arrested by customs officers and sent up to London for questioning. The spy, Thomas Dodwell, reported back to the Privy Council how the group had bribed ‘Raindall, the [officer] of Gravesend, [who] receiveth money of passengers, suffering them to pass without searching.’24
While his companions were imprisoned, the nineteen-year-old Gerard (whose cousin Sir Gilbert Gerard was Master of the Rolls and held some sway with the Government) was taken into custody first by his uncle, George Hastings, brother to the Earl of Huntingdon, then by the Bishop of London. Both men set about encouraging Gerard to convert to the Protestant faith. Both men failed. It was a measure of his strength of will that the teenager held out against the arguments of his two more powerful opponents, with the threat of imprisonment, and worse, hanging over his head. But whatever fear Gerard might have felt, he left the Bishop of London’s palace for prison still protesting his Catholicism.25
John Gerard was committed to the Marshalsea prison in Southwark on 5 March 1584. His year-long imprisonment was spent in the heady company of like-minded rebels against the nationalized Church: laymen and women arrested for their refusal to attend Protestant services and a number of priests awaiting execution. It was an intoxicating education. When at last his friends were able to secure his release from prison, in return for paid guarantees that he would not leave the country, his desire to become a Jesuit burnt fiercer than ever. At the end of May 1586 his chance came. An old friend of his, Anthony Babington, agreed to stand bail for him if he failed to appear before the authorities at the next quarter and John Gerard escaped to France. He was twenty-one.26
From France, Gerard travelled south to Italy, where he entered the English College of Rome, the companion school to Dr William Allen’s successful Reims institution. By now his general eagerness to become a priest had transformed itself into the specific ambition of becoming a priest on the English mission. Pope Sixtus V granted him dispensation to take his holy orders early, some months short of the statutory age. The Society of Jesus agreed to admit him into their ranks as a novice and let him finish his training as he worked. And at last, on 15 August 1588, John Gerard became a Jesuit priest in the company of Edward Oldcorne. He was ready to return home.27
Throughout late August and all of September, as the Armada fleet underwent its grim circumnavigation of the British Isles and rumour ran unchecked through the courts of Europe, Gerard and Oldcorne travelled north towards England, accompanied by two other priests. ‘Passing through Switzerland,’ Gerard wrote, ‘we stayed a night at Basle and decided to see the old Catholic buildings of the town: the Lutherans usually leave them intact but the Calvinists destroy them.’ At Reims, he noted, ‘we passed incognito’: the seminary city was full of spies. In Paris a prisoner in one of the city gaols calling himself Jacques Colerdin learned of their arrival. On 1 October Colerdin was able to scribble a letter to Sir Francis Walsingham in London, telling him that ‘There be 8 Priests over from Rome, whereof John Gerard…will be in England within five days.’ Colerdin, who described himself to the Archbishop of Paris as ‘an English priest and Bachelor in Theology’ in a petition he wrote seeking his release, was a Government informer.* His real name was Gilbert Gifford. He was, indeed, a Catholic priest, but since his arrest as an alleged accomplice in the Babington Plot he had found it prudent to switch sides in the religious