The Spanish Armada had achieved what no amount of religious reforms and parliamentary legislation over the preceding decades had been able to do. It had united a fractured nation behind its unhappy compromise of a nationalized Church in opposition to the Catholic crusade. It had bound Anglicanism and Englishness together seemingly indissolubly. And it had transformed all those who could not bring themselves to accept this new Church of England into potential traitors, fifth columnists willing, in the rhetoric of a royal proclamation issued that July, ‘to betray their own natural country and most unnaturally to join with foreign enemies in the spoil and destruction of the same’. To be a Catholic in the year 1588 was to be an unnatural Englishman. It was to be worse than that still, as a story told by a fellow Jesuit illustrated. In late August, as many Catholics awaited execution for their alleged treachery, a ‘certain lady went to a man of importance asking him to use his influence that the death of one of the condemned might be delayed. The first question was whether the person whose cause she pleaded was guilty of murder. She replied that he had not been condemned for any such thing, but only for the Catholic religion. “Oh dear,” said the gentleman, “For his religion! If he had committed murder I should not have hesitated to comply with your request; but as it is a question of religion, I dare not interfere.”’ To the English in Armada year, even homicide was less of an evil than Catholicism.39
And Gerard had come to join a covert mission, the first undertaking of which was to ask English Catholics to stand up and be counted, to demonstrate their faith by refusing to attend the Protestant Church, to identify themselves to a Government seeking to eradicate them as traitors. Small wonder then that in an England still reeling from the events of that year, in an England crying out for revenge, this task had acquired Herculean proportions.* 40
Fourteen years earlier, though, for the first young English priests to embark upon this newly begun mission, their venture must have seemed no less a trial of strength. They might have been returning home to their family and friends, but at the same time they were entering an unfamiliar, hostile world: a beleaguered and suspicious England whose savagery had yet to be put to the test. And they were entering that world in secret, in disguise, in the very manner of the political secret agents their homeland believed them to be. Formidable, too, had been the challenge of establishing the mission at the start, of drawing together the dejected exiles from an Oxford University shattered by religious reforms, of schooling them in martyrdom and of dispatching them home in increasing numbers to face unknown perils.
For his ninth task Hercules had only to steal the Amazon Queen’s belt—a gift she herself had been willing to grant him. John Gerard and his fellows were attempting to steal the souls of English men and women back to the Catholic Church, and to do so under the nose of the, perhaps, even more redoubtable English Queen. It was a labour that would come at a high price.
* Regiomontanus’s real name was Johan Muller, from Königsberg, now Kaliningrad, in Lithuania. He supplied Christopher Columbus with astronomical tables on his voyage across the Atlantic.
* At the beginning of 1588 Dr John Harvey was commissioned by the Privy Council to write an academic pamphlet denouncing the accuracy of prophecies in general and Regiomontanus’s in particular.
* Sixtus had said of Elizabeth ‘were she only a Catholic, she would be without her match, and we would esteem her highly’.
* His flagship, the San Martin, reached the Spanish port of Santander on 21 September, with 180 of her crew dead from disease and starvation, another forty killed in battle and the rest so weak the ship had to be towed into dock. Only some seventy ships of the fleet returned.
* In the context of this book the term ‘nationalism’ is not intended to convey any pre-occupation with English ethnic identity; rather, it is intended to convey the growing sense of English sovereignty at this period, in response to the fragmentation of Christendom and England’s loss of its European territories.
* The Duke of Medina Sidonia’s sailing orders to his fleet confirmed that ‘the principal foundation and cause, that have moved the King his Majesty to make and continue this journey, hath been, and is, to serve God; and to return unto his church a great many of contrite souls, that are oppressed by the heretics, enemies to our holy catholic faith’.
† The terms Catholic, Protestant and Anglican should be applied with a certain linguistic caution. Broadly, the word ‘Catholic’ was by now recognized to refer only to those followers of the Roman Church. The word ‘Protestant’ referred initially only to German church reformers, though by the late sixteenth century it had acquired a wider reference and was in use in England to describe followers of the State Church. English Protestantism, though, was a very different animal from its European counterparts. The word ‘Anglican’ seems first to have been used as a derogatory term by King James VI of Scotland in 1598. It was not until much later that it became synonymous with the Church of England and English Protestantism.
* In 1585 Philip II had offered himself to Pope Sixtus V as the sword of the Catholic Church in the fight to reconcile England with Rome. Previously, French Catholics, led by the powerful Guise family, had planned a series of invasions, with the intention of deposing Elizabeth and replacing her with the half-French Mary, Queen of Scots (Mary’s mother was Mary of Guise). Mary was Elizabeth’s de facto heir apparent, although Elizabeth never acknowledged her as such.
† Heretics, as defined by St Thomas (II-II: 11: 1) were those who, having professed the faith of Christ, then proceeded to corrupt it from within. They differed from Infidels who refused to believe in Christ at all, and from Apostates who renounced Christianity for another faith, or no faith altogether. The word heresy derives from the Greek word for choice.
* Every detail of this landing is taken from an account of it written up afterwards by one of the two Jesuits, Father John Gerard.
* The sheriff was the Crown’s chief executive officer in a county, in charge of keeping the peace, dispensing justice, and overseeing local elections.
* He was arrested in a Paris brothel in 1587, though the precise nature of his crime remains unclear. He died in prison in 1590.
† The 1586 Babington Plot was the last in a series of Catholic attempts to assassinate Elizabeth and free Mary, Queen of Scots in advance of a foreign invasion; it led to Mary’s execution. Anthony Babington, Gerard’s friend, appears to have been a man of more devotion than sense and how much the plot was the work of agents provocateurs remains ambiguous. Gilbert Gifford’s role is particularly questionable and most believe he was working for Walsingham from the start. Gerard’s father was also arrested for alleged complicity in the plot. He was released in October 1588.