The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court (32 page)

Together the activities of Persons and Campion strengthened the resolve of the Catholic community and as rumours circulated of preparations for a papal-sponsored invasion of England, the perceived threat of the Jesuits intensified. The danger to the Queen and her realm came not only from an invasion supported by Spain and the Pope but also from priests arriving from Rome and Rheims. They were agents of foreign powers sent to stir sedition and rebellion and remove Elizabeth from her throne. On 10 January 1581, a royal proclamation ordered the return of all English students from foreign seminaries, and the arrest of all Jesuits in England. The intent and purpose of the seminaries it stated, was to turn the Queen’s subjects in matters of religion and ‘from the acknowledgement of their natural duties unto Her Majesty’. Young English Catholics had been made ‘instruments in some wicked practices tending to the disquiet of this realm … yea to the moving of rebellion’.
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Parliament convened against this background of national anxiety. The opening speech, delivered by Sir Walter Mildmay, Chancellor of the Exchequer, spoke of anxieties about Jesuit infiltration which, he claimed, sought not only to ‘corrupt the realm with false doctrine’, but also, under that pretence, to ‘stir sedition’.
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The Pope had already emboldened ‘many undutiful subjects to stand firm in their disobedience to her Majesty and to her laws’ but now, Mildmay argued, he had ‘sent hither a sort of hypocrites naming themselves Jesuits, a rabble of vagrant friars newly sprung up and coming through the world to trouble the Church of God’. Growing ever more impassioned as he continued, Mildmay claimed their ‘principal errand is, by creeping into the houses and familiarities of men of behaviour and reputation, not only to corrupt the realm with false doctrine, but also, under that pretence, to stir up sedition to the peril of her Majesty and her good subjects’. Harsher laws were needed to meet the threat and to ensure the preservation and security of the Queen.
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The 1581 ‘Act to Retain the Queen’s Majesty’s Subject in Due Obedience’ heralded the start of a period of severe persecution of the Catholics. It was now treason for a priest to absolve Elizabeth’s subjects from their ‘natural obedience’ to her or to convert them ‘for that intent to the Romish religion’.
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This was directly targeted at the Jesuits and seminary priests and their converts.
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Such was the climate of fear that conversion to Catholicism now became synonymous with treason. The Act also stiffened the penalties for saying mass or for not attending church. Any priest who celebrated mass now faced a year’s imprisonment and a fine of 200 marks and the penalty for non-attendance was raised to a ruinous £20 a month.

The statute ‘against seditious words and rumours uttered against the Queen’s most excellent Majesty’ was aimed especially at those who ‘not only wished her Majesty’s death’ but by ‘prophesying, calculation or other lawful act’, tried to determine how long the Queen would live or who would succeed her.
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Prophesying the Queen’s death was also now a treasonable offence.

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Despite intense searches for the Catholic priests, Campion and Persons had managed to elude capture by regularly changing disguises and staying constantly on the move. But then, on Sunday 16 July, Campion was found at Lyford Grange in Berkshire, the home of Francis Yates, a prisoner in Reading gaol, who had asked Campion to visit his family. Having become suspicious of the activity at the house, royal officials arrived with a warrant ‘to take and apprehend, not any one man, but all priests, Jesuits and such like seditious persons’ that they found. When they broke through a hollow wall the priests were discovered and promptly arrested. Campion, three fellow priests and eight others were then taken under armed guard to the Tower of London where they were imprisoned and interrogated.
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Campion was examined directly about his loyalty to Queen Elizabeth and asked whether he believed her to be ‘a true and lawful queen, or a pretended queen and deprived, and in possession of her crown only de facto’. Campion refused to answer, saying only that ‘he meddleth neither to nor fro, and will not further answer, but requireth that they may answer’. Under questioning he revealed details of his time in England, including the Catholic families with whom he had stayed, where he had preached and left books and details of the secret printing press which had been moved from London to Stonor Park, near Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire. This was now promptly destroyed. After agonising torture on the rack and formal disputation with theologians of the English church in St Peter ad Vincula, the parish church of the Tower of London, the trial of Campion and the other priests took place in November at Westminster Hall. Edmund Campion with twelve priests and laymen, including William Allen and Robert Persons in their absence, were charged with plotting to kill the Queen, to change the government and ‘to incite, procure and induce diverse strangers and aliens … to invade the realm and raise, carry on and make war against the Queen’.
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All were found guilty of treason.

On Friday 1 December, Campion was tied to a wicker hurdle and dragged by horse through the streets of London to the place of execution at Tyburn; the inscription hung around his head read, ‘Edmund Campion, the seditious Jesuit’. He was hanged, as were the other priests, until he was almost dead, cut down from the gallows and then whilst still alive cut open and his bowels and genitals burned before him.
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Campion’s execution did little to lessen anxiety over the threat of the Jesuits to the realm and to the ‘safety of the Queen’s person’. Priests were now regularly captured and interrogated, Catholic families placed under surveillance, letters intercepted, seditious books burned and ports watched for Catholics coming in and out of England. Sir Francis Walsingham used his powerful network of spies across Europe to uncover Catholic plots, most of which sought to place Mary Stuart on the throne, and to preserve the Queen from harm. He planted agents in harbours across Europe, intercepted correspondence and brutally interrogated those who were believed to conspire against Elizabeth’s life and the security of the realm.

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On 31 October 1581, while Edmund Campion was being held and interrogated in the Tower, John Payne, a Catholic priest who had returned from Douai with Cuthbert Mayne four years before, was being tortured on the rack after being accused of being involved in a conspiracy to murder Elizabeth and her leading councillors.
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The plot had been revealed to Robert Dudley by George Eliot, an ‘ordinary Yeoman of Her Majesty’s Chamber’, as he described himself, and one of the royal officials who had captured Campion at Lyford Grange. Eliot, who had recently recanted his Catholic faith, claimed that Payne, whom he had known during his time spent in Catholic gentry homes in Essex and Kent, had masterminded the conspiracy, which also involved the rebel Earl of Westmoreland and leading exile Cardinal William Allen. This ‘horrible treason’ was, Eliot now claimed, ‘shortly to happen’.

The plan, sponsored by the Pope, was for fifty armed men to assassinate Elizabeth while she was on a royal progress. Three other groups would target Dudley, Cecil and Walsingham ‘and diverse others whose names he doth not well remember’. Eliot claimed that when he had asked Payne about ‘how they could find in their hearts to attempt an act of so great cruelty’, the priest responded by saying ‘that the killing [of] her Majesty was no offence to God, nor the uttermost cruelty they could use to her, not [to] any that took her part; but that they might lawfully do it to a brute beast’. Having heard Eliot’s statement, Dudley passed on the intelligence to Cecil who ordered that the priest be brought in and ‘examined’.
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On 20 March 1582, John Payne left the Tower and was delivered to the Sheriff of Essex in order to be conducted to his trial in Chelmsford.
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Despite his assertion of innocence and his claim that ‘his feet never did tread, his hands never did write, nor his wit ever invent any treason against her Majesty’, he was found guilty of treason and condemned to death. On Monday 2 April he was hanged, drawn and quartered. By the end of the reign some 200 priests and laypeople would share a similar traitor’s fate.

When a comet appeared over London that summer, fears were reignited that it boded the death of ‘some great person’.
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Elizabeth, then at her palace in Richmond, was urged by her women not to look out of her window, but ‘with a courage answering to the greatness of her state’, she ignored their petition and, looking towards the light, declared, ‘
Jacta est alea
’ – the die is cast.
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The Enemy Sleeps Not

In the autumn of 1583, John Somerville, a wealthy and well-born Catholic from Edstone, Warwickshire, began to engage in regular and intense conversation with what appeared to be a gardener on the estate of his father-in-law, Edward Arden, High Sheriff of Warwickshire. The gardener was in fact Hugh Hall, a Catholic priest whom Arden was secretly harbouring. According to the subsequent trial reports, Hall had talked to Somerville about the plight of Catholics in England, of Mary Queen of Scots being the rightful heir, and the moral corruption of the excommunicated Elizabeth, Henry VIII’s bastard daughter.

On 24 October, Somerville left his wife and two young daughters and set out for London. After about four miles he stopped for the night at a tavern in Ayno-on-the-hill, where he announced his plan to shoot the Queen with his pistol and ‘see her head set on a pole, for that she was a serpent and a viper’.
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Somerville had already been under surveillance as a Catholic and known sympathiser of Mary Stuart. He was immediately arrested and a few days later found himself under interrogation in the Tower of London. After examination it was apparent he was a man ‘of weak mind’, and had been several times ‘affected with frantic humour’, yet such was the fever of the times that he and his father-in-law Edward Arden, his wife, sister and mother-in-law together with Hugh Hall, their chaplain, were all arrested. Somerville was convicted of high treason, and he and his father-in-law were condemned to death. However, on the night before the sentence was to be carried out, Somerville hanged himself in his cell. This did not prevent the authorities from cutting off his head and placing it on a spike on London Bridge where the heads of all those who suffered the fate of traitors were displayed as a warning to others.
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Two weeks later, Francis Throckmorton, a young Catholic gentleman, was arrested at his house at Paul’s Wharf by the Thames in London. He had long been under surveillance having been suspected ‘upon secret intelligence given to the Queen’s majesty, that he was a privy [secret] conveyor and receiver of letters to and from the Scottish Queen’. Now, following the anxiety caused by the arrest of John Somerville, the government decided to act. Whilst Throckmorton was taken into custody, his house was searched and a number of incriminating papers discovered that had been copied out in his own hand. These included a list of safe harbours ‘for landing of foreign forces’, the names of prominent Catholics who could be relied on to support an invasion, pedigrees detailing Mary’s claim to the throne and a number of ‘infamous pamphlets against her Majesty printed beyond the seas’. Indeed he was ‘taken short at the time of his apprehension’ in composing a letter in cypher to Mary Queen of Scots.
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Throckmorton had been working as a secret courier, carrying letters between Mary and the French ambassador in London, Michel de Castelnau. Walsingham knew that Throckmorton was a regular visitor at Castelnau’s residence at Salisbury Court, just off Fleet Street, as the embassy was subject to his monitoring. Through the French ambassador, Throckmorton had become acquainted with three powerful members of the English Catholic nobility: Lord Henry Howard, the brother of Thomas, the 4th Duke of Norfolk, who had been executed as a traitor in 1572; Henry Percy, 8th Earl of Northumberland, whose brother Thomas, the 7th Earl had also been executed for treason in 1572; and Lord Thomas Paget, brother of Charles Paget, English émigré and known agent for the Guise.

On Friday 15 November, as Throckmorton was taken to the Tower, William Herle, Cecil’s long-serving intelligencer in London, wrote to his master of a great international plot that he had discovered that involved the Duke of Guise, cousin of Mary Queen of Scots, Francis Throckmorton and Lord Henry Howard. As Herle revealed in his letter to Cecil:

The chief mark that is shot at is her Majesty’s person, whom God doth and will preserve, according to the confident trust in him. The Duke of Guise is the director of the action, and the Pope is to confer the Kingdom by his gift, upon such a one as is to marry with the Scottish Queen.

Throckmorton was, as Herle described him, ‘a party very busy and an enemy to the present state’. His letter the following day added, ‘the world is full of mischief, for the enemy sleeps not’.
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Under interrogation Throckmorton denied his involvement in the plot and any knowledge of treason. He claimed the papers found at his house were not his but belonged to one of his household servants. Having refused to talk, Throckmorton was ‘somewhat pinched’ on the rack in the Tower on at least two occasions, before making his confession. He had been recruited to carry letters to and from the Spanish ambassador in London by Sir Francis Englefield, a leading Catholic exile at the Spanish court, who was long considered a significant threat to English interests. Throckmorton then proceeded to reveal the details of the conspiracy: a popular uprising in the north of England would coincide with an invasion led by the Duke of Guise and financially supported by Philip of Spain.
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Francis Throckmorton was tried and condemned for treason at the Guildhall in London on 21 May 1584.
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He threw himself on the Queen’s mercy, asking her to forgive the ‘inconsiderate rashness of unbridled youth’, but was executed on 10 July at Tyburn. It was just one more traitor put to death; many more would go the same way. As Elizabeth wrote in a letter to the French ambassador, ‘There are more than two hundred men of all ages who, at the instigation of the Jesuits, conspire to kill me.’
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Throckmorton had not been the only Catholic noble under surveillance during the previous year. In November, William Herle had reported to Cecil that he had seen Charles Arundell, another Catholic gentleman, buying gloves and perfume from a new perfumier in Abchurch Street. Arundell was, Herle deduced, intending to ‘use them to poison the Queen, she having her sense of smelling so perfect, and delighted with good savours’.
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