Heretic Queen (33 page)

On July 17, Fitzmaurice and Dr. Sander sailed into Dingle Bay in the far southwest of Ireland. Together Fitzmaurice and Sander proclaimed the inspiration and purpose of their invasion: to fight against the “she-tyrant which refuseth to hear Christ, speaking by his vicar [the Pope].” Within days, an English privateer, Captain Courtenay, had seized and led away Fitzmaurice's tiny fleet. Burghley's man in Ireland, the Earl of Ormond, agreed to send five hundred men to meet Fitzmaurice and his troops. Though valiantly fought, it was all over by the end of October, and Fitzmaurice was dead. Despite a two-year-long relentless pursuit, Dr. Sander escaped capture, only to die alone in a wood, starved and frozen with his breviary and Bible under his arm. The “Second Desmond Rebellion” unleashed by Fitzmaurice and Sander turned into tribal warfare, which only ended with the death of the Earl of Desmond, Gerald Fitzgerald, in 1583.

A third attempt to invade England through its postern gate of Ireland was hatched in January 1580. An English merchant, John Dunne, who was trading in Bayonne, France, at the time, bribed a Spanish monk into telling him that Spanish forces were being raised for Ireland with the pope's blessing. He informed Walsingham at once. On verification by Walsingham's own agents, the secretary of state learned that eighteen ships were made ready, carrying twenty thousand men. With the pope's financial aid, this force grew to at least forty ships.

Elizabeth responded by sending reinforcements and her rapscallion adventurer William Winter with four ships to guard the Irish coast. At the end of the day, only two invasion ships made landfall at Smerwick and attempted to make a bridgehead. Within three days, they laid down their arms and surrendered. Nearly all were slaughtered in cold blood.
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The three failed
papal-sponsored invasions did have one unintended success. Elizabeth's steady policy of balancing European power that had prevailed for the first twenty years of her reign now wavered. The Catholic Enterprise of England had failed so far, and it was obvious that there would be other attempts. England needed the protection of a stronger partner, and so Elizabeth sought a new rapprochement with France and a reopening of the marriage treaty with Henry III's brother, Francis, Duke of Anjou.

Of course, Elizabeth's desire to withstand all attacks by Catholic powers through a marriage to Anjou was, to say the least, deeply unpopular with the vast majority of her people. When it was added to the perceived slackening of measures against English Catholics, law-abiding citizens became understandably uneasy. It was the devil of a situation: Elizabeth needed to reassure Anjou and France that she could moderate hostile reaction against the English Catholics, while masking her personal aversion to the godly Puritans and maintaining the full force of the Anglican settlement.

In the event, Elizabeth couldn't hold out against the storm of popular opinion, nor are we sure she wanted to. Before the end of 1579, around the time of Cuthbert Mayne's execution, Elizabeth wrote to Anjou breaking off their engagement. “We poor inhabitants of the barbarous isle must be careful in appearing for judgment,” Elizabeth wrote Anjou, “where such ingenious judges of our knowledge hold their seat in so high a place.”
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For the pope, it was a pyrrhic victory that left the “she-tyrant” exposed, albeit still in power.

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Then, in 1580,
it seemed that a turning point in the fortunes of the pope's single-minded desire to overthrow Elizabeth finally arose. Until now, William Allen had resisted the involvement of the Jesuits in the English struggle. The execution of Cuthbert Mayne for treason, followed by two further executions, changed whatever reservations Allen seemed to have had. We shall never know for certain if it was Allen's aversion to call upon Loyola's men as his holy warriors or the Jesuit Society's fourth superior general Everard Mercurian's reluctance to become involved in the English cause. Mercurian had grown up in the Low Countries and had seen all sorts of obstacles to Jesuit missions that hinged on the successful conversion of a religious flock in conjunction with the politics of the times.

For Mercurian, English Catholicism had become so opaque in the previous twenty years of Elizabeth's reign that fulfilling Jesuit goals seemed impossible. Jesuit priests would need to live “in secular men's houses in secular apparel.” He fretted that they would founder “as how also their rules and orders for conservation of religious spirit might there be observed.” More damning still was that the Jesuits had far-flung operations from Argentina to Japan at the coalface of Christian conflicts with “heathen peoples,” and Mercurian feared a face-off with Protestants within Europe would damage their greater cause. Yet Mercurian finally buckled. The arrival in Rome in 1579 of the Oxford exile Robert Persons gave Allen the ally he needed to move Mercurian. Together with another priest, Edmund Campion, the two men were destined to bring Catholicism back to England.

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This was the same
Edmund Campion who had so impressed Elizabeth and Leicester at Oxford in 1566 and had escaped prosecution in Ireland in 1574. By 1580, Campion was a graduate of Douai and a Catholic priest. Still, his successes within the Catholic exile community were not enough for this exceptional young man, of whom Cecil lamented it was “a very great pity to see so notable a man leave his country.”
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After his ordination, Campion took the final step onto the ladder to martyrdom. He walked from Douai to Rome and became a member of the Society of Jesus. It was their founder, Ignatius Loyola, who reportedly said “Give me a boy at the age of seven, and he will be mine forever.” Campion proved to be a late bloomer.

Like Campion, Persons had not always been an avowed Catholic. While at Oxford, he had dabbled with the more defined theological positions of Calvinism before switching his allegiance to Catholicism. It was his initial indecision that allowed him to obtain his first degree at Oxford by taking the Oath of Supremacy on May 31, 1568. In 1570, however, on seeing the deprivation of another Balliol College fellow and Catholic, Richard Garnet, Persons became so distressed that he “temporarily” left Oxford. Persons's initial desire to conform, then recant, was a common story for independent thinkers of the day. His father converted to Rome much later; one of his brothers became a Protestant clergyman, the other a Catholic. His mother sheltered among the recusant underground, ending her days at the notorious Enfield home of Anne Vaux at White Webbs.
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No one knows with certainty why Persons finally resigned his fellowship at Balliol College in February 1574. Though charged by the master at Balliol with fiddling the accounts while he was the college bursar and dean, Persons most likely had already shown his own special blend of cussedness combined with a strong sense of right and wrong. Given leave to stay at the college through Lent, he was summarily expelled, as traditional stories would have us believe, by the “ringing of bells backwards, as for a fire” when he tried to enforce the Lenten fast. By 1581, he would be depicted as a screech owl by the Puritan preacher John Field in his religious tract
A Caveat for Parsons Howlet.
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Through this tract, it is easy to imagine how Persons's voice sounded to those who disagreed with him, and how his reputation as a “fierce-natured” fellow became part of his legacy.

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As a result,
toward the end of 1579, the final conversion of Superior General Mercurian to the English cause seems to have been due to a combined onslaught of Persons's reasoned arguments and Allen's reassurances that they could succeed in a truly Jesuit mission to reconvert England to Catholicism.

While they planned the final details of the mission in Rome, an earthquake hit London on April 6, 1580. Stones rained down from St. Paul's Cathedral; an apprentice was crushed by falling masonry at Newgate; the great clock bell at the Palace of Westminster struck against itself repeatedly, “shaking the earth”; the seas foamed; ships tottered, and a portion of the White Cliffs of Dover tumbled into the sea. For a people who believed that natural phenomena were “nothing but the very finger of God working his creatures” it was a portent of some unseen calamity to come. Some astrologers like Dr. John Dee sought to calm jangled nerves by claiming that the movement of the earth and celestial bodies was predictable by astrology and science rather than at the pulpit, but they were soon silenced by Puritans and Anglicans alike.
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When ghostly castles or ships, the haunting cries of invisible hounds, “skulls of dead men,” or other such terrifying visions appeared in the skies, it is little wonder that many feared God's retribution for the execution of the priest Cuthbert Mayne.

Mayne's execution for treason also moved Mercurian to take somewhat unusual measures. His orders to Persons and Campion stipulated that they were to avoid heretics at all costs. In fact, Mercurian went a step further. They were to “behave that all may see that the only gain they covet is that of souls” and not to entangle themselves in the affairs of the heretic English state. As Edmund Campion made his way back to Rome from his rhetoric teaching post in Prague to join Robert Persons for their joint mission, Mercurian stressed that neither man was to have about his person anything of a forbidden nature in English law: no papal bulls, no Agnus Dei.

Theirs would be a mission solely to reconvert the lapsed English to Catholicism. Unlike Judaism, which had over centuries adapted itself successfully into the home for its survival, English Catholicism, so the argument ran, needed a priest officiating to ensure correct adherence to the Word. Persons, though the younger of the two, was appointed leader of the mission; Campion his lieutenant. As they left Rome in April 1580, traveling on foot and using aliases to escape detection, a letter was sent from a well-wishing seminarian who witnessed their departure, describing what he felt was assuredly a turning point in history. That letter was intercepted by an English spy and its contents forwarded to Sir Francis Walsingham. The “secret” mission was awaited eagerly in England, long before the pair had crossed the Alps into France.

One of the great mysteries of their mission to England was whether Persons and Campion had recognized the political dimension instigated by the pope and Spain to overthrow Elizabeth the “she-tyrant.” Given the pressures on English Catholic exiles and the pair's experiences and presence in Rome over several months, as well as the failed attempts to invade Ireland, both men would have needed to be the “least informed Englishmen in Europe” to remain unaware of the bigger picture.
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Having withstood three “invasions” with equanimity, in June 1580 Elizabeth became alarmed when she learned that Persons and Campion had crossed into England under assumed names. Burghley immediately issued a proclamation in the queen's name, which unfortunately ran to two folios. This was no punchy piece of propaganda. While it held some stirring messages about the pope and the king of Spain seeking to “dispose of the Crown” and the queen striving to “maintain her honour and glory by retaining her people in the true profession of the Gospel and free from the bondage of Roman tyranny,” its sheer tediousness was enough to anesthetize the most well-wishing reader.
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As a result, the plan to segregate recusants from the general population went nearly unnoticed by many as a key part of the proclamation.

It was the oratory of Edmund Campion that awakened them. At St. Mary Overie (Southwark Cathedral today) Persons and Campion swore publicly that they had been ignorant of the pope's Irish invasion plans and even read out Mercurian's orders forbidding them from dabbling in “matters of state.” Some were persuaded; others feared government retribution against England's Catholics. In one church, on one day, the two opposing English Catholic worldviews were laid bare. It was Campion's oratory that swayed those who had conformed, claiming that if they were to worship in an Anglican service, it would be a final victory for the Elizabethan settlement.
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He won the day. Just.

The meeting broke up shortly before a former student from Rome—now a government informer, Charles Sledd—led an official searcher to St. Mary Overie. Persons and Campion were already on the Great North Road, heading for the relative safety of Hoxton (Hackney in London today), where they spent the night.
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The following morning they were surprised by the arrival of Thomas Pound, a recusant prisoner who had bribed his way out of the Marshalsea prison. As a loyal follower of theirs, Pound had been deputized by his fellow recusants to ride through the night to talk to Persons and Campion. His mission was to persuade the priests into writing a declaration of the purpose of their mission, which Pound would safeguard in prison and only publish in the event of their capture. It would, at the very least, protect them from the malice of a propaganda coup by the government branding them as political agitators. Both men agreed and duly wrote out their declarations. Persons sealed his; Campion left his open for anyone to read.

Having returned to the Marshalsea with his mission accomplished, Pound couldn't resist reading Campion's statement. He was so moved that he showed it to his fellow recusant prisoners. Addressed to “Her Majesty's Privy Council,” one of the most stirring paragraphs still echoes through time: “Many innocent hands are lifted up to heaven for you daily by those English students, whose posterity shall never die, which beyond seas, gathering virtue and sufficient knowledge for the purpose, are determined never to give you over, but either to win you heaven, or to die upon your pikes.”
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In no time at all, copies were circulated throughout the jail, then on to the prisoners' visitors and out into London and beyond. What had been intended as a document to be read only in the event of capture had become a political manifesto to defend the liberties of English Catholics.