Cogitations of a Catholic Bookworm: GOD's Secret Agents (A Book Review)

GOD'S Secret Agents
QUEEN ELIZABETH’S
Forbidden Priests and the Hatching of the
GUNPOWDER PLOT

by Alice Hogge

“Southwell was lifted into the cart. This was the moment he had waited for all his life. ‘Take now your rest in the shade,’ he had written nine years earlier, ‘and open your mouths to draw in breath, so that when your hour comes, you too may go down into the sun-scorched arena.’ Tyburn in February had become Southwell’s sun-scorched arena now and he was ready. He commended into God’s hands the Queen, his country and his soul. The hangman stripped him to his shirt and placed the noose about his neck. ‘While we live we conquer, nor shall we be less victorious if we die,’ he had written. Now he made the sign of the cross, murmuring, “in manus tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum meum.’ And slowly the cart was drawn away.” (God’s Secret Agents, p. 190)

Thus was ended at Tyburn Tree the life of Saint Robert Southwell: priest, martyr, poet, Englishman. St. Robert Southwell is one of 124 Catholic priests martyred during the reign of England’s Elizabeth I, when simply being ordained a Roman Catholic priest was sufficient cause to be put to death. One of the most famous of those martyrs is St. Edmund Campion, but Alice Hogge in her first book introduces us to some of the priests and laymen alike who, while lesser known, are no less an inspiration for their bravery and determination in aiding the beleaguered Catholics of Elizabethan England.

Elizabeth ascended the throne in 1558, daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. She moved quickly in 1559 to enact the Act of Supremacy, which established her as the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, and the Act of Uniformity, which proscribed Catholics from attending Mass and forced them into weekly attendance in their local Anglican parish or be fined, with cumulative fines resulting in imprisonment. Many Catholics were too fearful to cross the power of the state, and gradually traded their Catholicism for political expediency. Those Catholics who steadfastly refused to attend the Anglican Church were called recusants, from the Latin word recusare, to refuse. Despite the dangers inherent in harboring priests and assisting at their clandestine Masses, Catholics flourished in secret pockets of resistance across the realm. Indeed, the Mayor of Oxford complained that ‘there were not three houses in [Oxford] that were not filled with papists’.

One of those Catholics, Nicholas Owen, assumed the critical assignment of creating hiding places to conceal the priests from the government’s priest-hunters, known as pursuivants. He devised and constructed priest-holes: cunningly devised hiding places tucked into the walls, stairwells, chimneys and other architectural features of the English country homes which sheltered the outlawed clerics. When the danger alert was given, the owners of the house could quickly hustle the priest into the hiding place (along with his forbidden vestments and altar vessels) for days at a time, until the pursuivants tired of searching. It was a high-stakes game of hide and seek in which losing meant certain death, both for the priest and for the family who sheltered him. In 1606, the game came undone for Nicholas Owen. He was captured when an informant gave away his secret hiding place. Despite the vicious tortures inflicted on him to force from him names and locations of priest-holes, Nicholas Owen betrayed not a single one of them. He joined the glorious ranks of the English Martyrs, and was canonized in 1970 along with 39 others, including Edmund Campion and Robert Southwell.

Hogge’s research is meticulous, and her narrative is engaging. Her frequent use of direct quotations from the pertinent historical characters brings Elizabethan history to life, and the reader is caught up in the game of chess played out across the width and breadth of England, writ large, in blood; for the Queen must have her pawn. And although the book title references the Gunpowder Plot, it does not occupy the majority of her historical narrative; rather, she marks its proper place in the historical timeline.

The year was 1605, two years after the death of Queen Elizabeth. The Gunpowder Plot was a failed attempt by a group of Catholics led by Guido (Guy) Fawkes to assassinate Elizabeth’s successor, King James, by blowing up the Parliament Building. The Jesuit Superior in England, Henry Garnet, had prior knowledge of the plot after hearing the confession of one of the conspirators. He entreated them without success to abandon the plan and when the group was found out and arrested, so too was Henry Garnet.

The government was ecstatic – they finally had the man who had eluded them for so many years. There are questions to this day about the role of the government in the Gunpowder Plot, and speculation suggests it was part of an elaborate plan to implicate the Jesuits for political gain. Whether or not it can be proved one way or the other, history shows that the government knew of the plot beforehand, and took steps that ensured Garnet’s show trial was a travesty. He was allowed no lawyer and given no access to notes or the examinations read against him. Eight conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot and Henry Garnet were found guilty of treason and were sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered. The government prosecutors finally had their long-sought “proof” to present to the populace – “proof” that Catholics in general and Jesuits in particular were a danger to the country.

Repercussions from the Gunpowder Plot reverberated around the country as a new round of Catholic repression ensued:

“No known Catholic recusant might enter a royal palace. No known Catholic recusant might come within 10 miles of the City of London. No known Catholic recusant might practice the law or medicine, or hold a commission in the Army or Navy; neither might a known Catholic recusant, nor anyone with a recusant wife, hold public office...” (p.380)

It would be another two hundred years before the first Catholic Relief Acts were passed, bringing England full circle from what had been ignited 300 years earlier by Henry VIII. While a brave remnant of the Catholic faithful remained, England’s churches and monasteries were in ruin; her monks turned out to wander the countryside, and her priests in hiding or defiant martyrdom:

“It took the hangman pulling on his legs before Southwell’s body finally stopped moving, for the rope had been clumsily fixed about his neck. Three times one of the attending officers moved in to cut him down alive, but the crowd reacted angrily and from their number Lord Mountjoy stepped forward to stay the man. When the disemboweling was finished and Southwell’s head was held aloft to the people there was silence: ‘no one was heard to cry “Traitor, traitor!” as before times they were wont to do’. His head was set upon London Bridge and his four quarters upon four gates in the city walls. It remained to be seen what effect his death would have upon the mission, but for now Southwell had had his wish. The captive had been set free.”

Hogge, A. (2005) "God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth’s Forbidden Priests and the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot "; Harper Collins; ISBN 0-06-054227-6

Cogitations of a Catholic Bookworm or "CCB" is a Catholic wife and mother who lives somewhere in the blogosphere "west of Greenland." She will write occasional reviews of books for this blog.