692. Elizabeth I vs The Catholics: A Massacre in Paris (Part 2)

What inspired the deadliest bloodbath of the Tudor age: the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572, in which protestants were slaughtered en masse? How did it drive Elizabeth I’s spy master, Francis Walsingham, to repress all treasonous activity in her realm? And, what terrible treason was brewing in Rome…? Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, Sir Francis Walsingham, and one of the most devilish religious conspiracies of all time… Lloyds. 250 years on and still backing the nation's aspirations. *The Rest Is History LIVE: The Ultimate Victorian Adventure* The maddest expedition in history and it’s NEVER been heard before on the show: join Tom Holland & Dominic Sandbrook LIVE at the Southbank as they tell the bonkers story of Queen Victoria ordering one of history’s most daring assignments ever. ⁠⁠⁠Tickets available for Friday 4th September⁠⁠⁠, the Saturday show is SOLD OUT. Summer sale is here: get an annual membership for an extra 20% off with code SUMMER26. That's ad-free listening, every bonus episode, and full access to our exclusive members' series. Sale ends August 31st, so grab it before summer's over. https://therestishistory.com/club?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=summersale26&utm_term=listeners&utm_content=epdescriptionsummer To read our new newsletter, sign up at: ⁠therestishistory.com/newsletters⁠ Advertise with us: ⁠[email protected] _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Video Editors: Jack Meek, Harry Swan + Adam Thornton Social Producer: Harry Balden Producers: Tabby Syrett & Aaliyah Akude Senior Producer: Callum Hill Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 2:53Speaker 01

  Cousin tis he, I know him by his look. See where my soldier shot him through the arm. He missed him near, but we have struck him now. Ah, thou base degenerate, chief standard bearer to the Lutherans. Thus, in despite of thy religion, the Duke of Guise stamps on thy lifeless bulk. Away with him. Cut off his head and hands and send them for a present to the Pope. And when this just revenge is finished, unto Mount Faucon will we drag his corpse. And he that living hated, so the cross shall, being dead, be hanged thereon in chains. Now, no delay. Go and shoot the ordinance off. That they which have already set the street may know their watchword.

• 3:37Speaker 01

  And then toll the bell. And so, let's forward to the massacre.

• 3:44Speaker 00

  Chilling.

• 3:45Speaker 01

  So, that was the sinister Henri or Henry, Duke of Guise, as ventriloquized by Christopher Marlowe in his tragedy, The Massacre at Paris, which he wrote in 1593. And what that play describes is the most infamous bloodbath in all 16th century European history. It is the massacre, the pogrom against French Protestants, or Huguenot as they were called, which began on the 24th of August, 1572, St. Bartholomew's Day. And Marlowe was writing his play two decades later.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  But the events of that day, the bloodshed in the streets of Paris, were still stamped onto the imaginations of English Protestants. They haunted their dreams because this was the proof. Proof beyond any possible doubt. The Catholics were set on extirpating the true religion, the true Protestant faith, that they were plotting and conspiring to destroy Protestantism. And that if they were ever given the opportunity, there was no atrocity, no barbarism, no crime, no cruelty that they would not commit in the name of their hellish fanatical devotion to the Bishop of Rome and his underlings.

• 5:08Speaker 01

  And Tom, people may be thinking, well, this is very overstated and very melodramatic. But actually, what the Duke of Guise is promising in that speech, the massacre, you know, he's punished this bloke, what's happened to this one guy is going to happen to thousands of other people. I mean, this is not so far from the reality of what actually did happen that day in Paris, is it?

• 5:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, as we'll see, Marlowe is drawing on contemporaneous accounts for his drama. And even though in the play, the Duke of Guise is a kind of classic Tudor, dramatic Machiavell kind of cackling and all of that. The words in his speech do correspond, as you said, to what happened. So, the guy who was shot through the arm at the beginning of that speech, and then he gets dispatched by Guise's men and the Duke of Guise himself kind of jumps on him. So, that is the Admiral of France, and we talked about him in our previous episode. He's a very distinguished soldier called Gaspar de Colligny.

• 6:09Speaker 00

  And the reason that the Duke of Guise is so triumphant as he stands over the corpse of Colligny, as he is in the play, is because Guise, although by now he's 21, so still a very, very young man, he is the most powerful Catholic nobleman in France. And Colligny is the leader of the Huguenots, the French Protestants. But as we also mentioned in our previous episode, Guise's hatred for Colligny is personal as well as sectarian. Because he blames the Admiral for having sponsored the assassination of his father nine years before. And so, listeners may be wondering, well, you know, there is this intense ideological and personal hatred

• 6:53Speaker 00

  between the Duke of Guise and Colligny. What on earth are they doing, you know, in the same city? Why are they in the same place if there's this civil war raging on? They are there because a ritual has been celebrated, which it is hoped may end the civil war in France between Catholics and Protestants. And it's a wedding between a Catholic and a Protestant. So, the Catholic is the sister of the French King, Charles IX, Charles IX. And she has married the Protestant King of Navarre, who inevitably is also called Henry. And as a rule of thumb in this period in France, almost everyone important is called Henry. And there will be more to come. People will be excited to learn.

• 7:37Speaker 00

  And Colligny, the Protestant, has been invited as a particular guest of honour. So, there's this idea that Catholics and Protestants are going to be reconciled. Now, Guise, who strongly disapproved of this wedding, he has seized his chance for vengeance. So, first of all, he sponsored this assassination attempt on Colligny. And this was the shooting that had left Colligny, as Marlowe puts it, shot through the arm. And then, two days later, Guise sends a death squad to attack Colligny directly in his rooms. And they arrive there and they find that a unit of musketeers have been stationed outside the doorway leading up to Colligny's quarters. And they've been sent there by the King on Charles IX's orders

• 8:18Speaker 00

  to protect Colligny against any threats from Catholic intruders. But the musketeers, when the Duke of Guise's men arrive, they go brilliant. Yeah, let's kill him. And so, they force the door, they clatter their way up the steps, they burst into Colligny's room, they murder him. And then they hurl the body out from the window down into the street where the Duke of Guise is standing. And the Duke of Guise then tramples Colligny's corpse down. And worse is to follow, and it's described by a Huguenot lawyer called François Ottman. And he writes, "Colligny remained exposed to all sorts of ignominy, with some of his limbs cut off. He was dragged through the mud and finally, after three days, was strung up by the feet at Montfaucon,

• 9:01Speaker 00

  where he remained for several days as a trophy and a mark of the cruelty and rage which the people of Paris exacted on him, not just in life, but also on his dead body." And Ottman's account of this massacre was one of many that were translated into English. And it was very, very influential. And you can tell how Marlowe drew on it very precisely for his play. So, that's the end of Colligny. But meanwhile, Guise's men are hunting down Colligny's lieutenants and killing them. And at the same time, there's a kind of trigger effect. Because in the Louvre, the Swiss Guards who protect the King

• 9:41Speaker 00

  have woken up all the Protestant noblemen who are staying in the Louvre as Charles IX's guests. They have disarmed these Protestant noblemen and then slaughtered them en masse. And all the while, as described in Marlowe's play, so there's this kind of tolling of the bell, the toxin of the Church of Saint-Germain is sounding. And it's a signal for a wholesale massacre. An uprising of Catholics across Paris against their Protestant neighbours.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  So, this is this extraordinary dramatic event that plays such a massive part in the story of Europe in the 16th century, but also of Elizabethan England's relationship with its neighbours. So, we're going to get right into the details of the massacre. This is a classic sectarian mob violence, but it's been masterminded, right? There are signals, there are very powerful people who are controlling it. And there's a sort of deliberate cold-bloodedness to it. That there's been these years of tension and violence between Catholics and Protestants. But this is a genuine, premeditated attempt to settle accounts once and for all. And basically to kill all the Protestants in Paris? Is that the, was that too strong?

• 10:58Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, the details of the slaughter are hideous. So, maybe up to 5,000 Protestants murdered in Paris, tens of thousands more in copycat massacres across France. And as you say, I mean, it is undoubtedly fuelled by sectarian hatred. And a measure of this, I mean, it's really horrible. Is that a lot of the slaughter that is inflicted on the Huguenots, and I'm quoting here from the definitive new book on the massacre by Joanna Arlet. And she writes that the Catholic slaughter of the of the Huguenots corresponded to a wish to destroy all chances of proliferation by the group that their murderers sought to eliminate.

• 11:41Speaker 00

  And so what that meant in effect was that Protestant men were not just murdered, they were castrated, that pregnant women had their bellies slashed open and the foetuses pulled out, and that children were targeted for wholesale butchery, which was framed by Protestants understandably as a new massacre of the innocents. So when Herod sent his soldiers to slaughter the innocents in Bethlehem. And one of the Protestant narratives described how the Seine was full of empty children's cradles from which the assassins had torn the newborn in order to steal their swaddling clothes before drowning them. And there's another very notorious account written by

• 12:25Speaker 00

  a Calvinist pastor who described seeing a young child being held by a Catholic with a large beard. And this child was kind of gurgling with delight, has reached with his tiny fingers to play with the curls of the Catholic's beard. And then the Catholic hurled this small child to his death into the Seine.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  People may be saying, well, I mean, God, we've heard stories like this a thousand times and the rest is history. And is this not just pure Protestant propaganda, rather like the propaganda that you had in the 1640s about the Catholic uprising in Ireland? And there were claims that, you know, lots of Protestants were being massacred and these hideous kind of often sexual kind of crimes and whatnot. Is this more of the same? Or is there genuine substance in these claims?

• 13:12Speaker 00

  Well, Protestants are definitely writing these terms, but so too are Catholics. So here is a Catholic witness. Naked bodies lay pierced by a thousand stabs in the streets. No distinction was made for sex, age, or the status of people. And there are scenes of completely emblematic horror, which haunt the age. And they are described by Catholics as well as by Protestants. So to give you some of these scenes of horror, there's a famous professor at the University of Paris who was murdered, defenestrated as Colony had been chucked out of a window and disemboweled. And his corpse is then lashed with whips by schoolboys. So it's a kind of emblem of

• 13:54Speaker 00

  order turned upside down. There's a Protestant bookseller who is burnt alive on a pyre fashioned out of the books from his shop. And there is a woman who was tied by her hair to the arch of the bridge by Notre Dame. And she hung there for three days before the corpse of her husband was dropped on top of her and dragged her down into the Seine. Thus, they were united in their burial. I mean, some of these stories sound kind of too emblematic, perhaps, to be true. But I think that you don't get stories like those coming from both sides of the sectarian divide, unless the scenes of slaughter really are horrific.

• 14:34Speaker 01

  And isn't one of the things that adds to it, the fact that there, when the news of the massacre first breaks, the reaction of a lot of French Catholics is not one of embarrassment or shame or anything like that, but unbridled delight and joy.

• 14:47Speaker 00

  Well, in France, I mean, the Catholics are, I mean, not all of them, but but across cities in France, they are doing copycat massacres. But I think what's really shocking, and particularly to Protestants, but also actually to a lot of Catholics as well, is the reaction from the leading figures in the Catholic world. So the Pope ordered a te deum to be sung, and he issued a commemorative medal, which showed an angel with a cross and a drawn sword killing heretics. So he's basically saying, this is great, fantastic, here's a medal. And Philip II of Spain, the most powerful Catholic king, when he receives the news of the massacre, he goes to a monastery to pray and to give thanks to God. And then he he returns to court and he speaks to the French ambassador and laughs and

• 15:31Speaker 00

  says that your master, Charles IX, well, he truly deserves his title of most Christian king for this godly massacre. So that's the initial response. But I do think that in due course, when the full details of what has happened starts to emerge, that there is a kind of feeling of embarrassment among Catholics who had celebrated the massacre as a kind of godly cleansing. And the excitement comes to be replaced almost by a sense of shame. And in fact, even at the time in Paris, there were Catholics who were appalled by the slaughter. So monasteries in the capital had provided shelter to Huguenot fugitives. And individual Catholics too had very bravely offered shelter and refuge to Protestants

• 16:15Speaker 00

  who were fleeing mobs. And intriguingly, and this really complicates the kind of the sense that we have from Elizabethan propaganda about the Gies, this very powerful Catholic family, the Duke of Gies offered shelter to fugitive Catholics.

• 16:30Speaker 01

  And is this because basically it had got out of hand from what it originally planned? He'd planned this as an internal aristocratic, settling accounts in an aristocratic feud? And actually, it had then turned into something much bigger. He'd lost control of it in a way.

• 16:43Speaker 00

  I think also by offering Protestant noblemen against whom he doesn't have a grudge, shelter, he's getting, you know, he's, he's building up credit with them. So he's always kind of calculating. So to that extent, it may be a slightly kind of Machiavellian tactic. I mean, but it may also reflect a kind of genuine sense of compassion. But I mean, he wasn't very compassionate when he was trampling down the corpse of Colony, it has to be said.

• 17:03Speaker 01

  I know.

• 17:04Speaker 00

  The fact that Gies can commission the assassination of Colony and then offer shelter to Huguenot fugitives later on, I think implies the fact that what we call the Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre wasn't just a single massacre, it was a whole kind of confluence of blood feuds and pogroms. So Gies's attack on Colony and his followers had fused with Charles IX's very opportunistic murder of the Protestant nobleman in his care. And the news of these murders, I think then had in turn inspired a kind of sectarian bloodlust.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 17:41Speaker 00

  That had gripped the whole of Paris. And so lots of the Protestants who are killed, I mean, they're killed maybe because they're Protestant, but they're also killed probably, maybe it was the kind of rival bookseller who got rid of that, you know, the Huguenot bookseller or whatever.

• 17:56Speaker 01

  They're the worst, aren't they, booksellers?

• 17:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, Catholic booksellers. And this is what Joanna Arlet in her recently published book argues. And I think it's, you know, it's been a kind of revelatory text. People have kind of really accepted the force of that argument.

• 18:10Speaker 01

  But if you're looking at it from England, come on, if you're looking at it from England, though, I mean, you're not saying, oh, well, the extenuating circumstances. Naturally, there are lots of different massacres here and let's not conflate them. You're looking at this and you're saying, come on, we've been telling you for years that Catholics are evil conspirators who are plotting to kill us all. And guess what? They've just done it in Paris.

• 18:28Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, we know that if you see people from a different religious tradition as a kind of mass, and you're telling that they're going to do terrible things, and then something terrible does get done in the name of that religion, of course, you're tempted to feel that all your darkest suspicions have been confirmed. And that's undoubtedly what happens with Protestants in England. And William Cecil, Elizabeth I, chief minister, who we were talking about in our previous episode, and who at the end of that episode became Lord Burghley, so let's call him Burghley, when he gets the news from Paris, he takes for granted that this is the manifestation of Satan's workings. And he, all along, right the way from when he first became Elizabeth's first minister, when she ascended the throne,

• 19:13Speaker 00

  he has been convinced that there is a Catholic international conspiracy to overthrow the cause of Protestantism in England, and that foreign Catholics, like the Pope, like the Duke of Gies, like Philip II, all of whom, as he sees it, are implicated in either perpetrating or celebrating the Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre, that they want to see the same thing happen in England, and that they have a very dark and sinister plan, namely to murder Queen Elizabeth, who is a virgin queen, has no heir, no Protestant heir, no heir at all, and to replace her on the English throne with her Catholic cousin, Mary Stuart,

• 19:54Speaker 00

  the Queen of Scots, who is a prisoner in England. And that the Pope in particular has made his ambitions for this plot very clear by two years before in 1570, excommunicating Elizabeth and telling Catholics with the full force of, you know, a papal bull, that they have to work actively for her overthrow, essentially kind of try to eliminate her, maybe by assassination or whatever.

• 20:24Speaker 01

  But doesn't the massacre in Paris suggest that actually the Catholic plotter's ambitions might go further, that it's not just about assassinating one person, the Queen, but they might, you know, if they got the chance, they would carry out a similar bloodbath, you know, in the streets of London or something?

• 20:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. And he's bolstered in this view by the man who had been appointed by Elizabeth to serve as her ambassador in France. And this is none other than Francis Walsingham, who, again, we met in the previous episode, like Cecil, Lord Burghley, he's a very passionate Protestant, he's very subtle and implacable in his service to the Queen. He is a guy who is very skilled and practiced at interrogating Catholic spies.

• 21:12Speaker 00

  And so he is a very, very committed Protestant. And so it must have been incredibly unsettling for him to find himself in the middle of this kind of great pogrom of the Huguenots, particularly since his residence in Paris was very close to the Church of Saint Germain. So that one, you know, the tolling of the bell signalling the onset of the massacre. And he had used his house as a kind of asylum for terrified Huguenots and also for English Protestants. So three English Protestants get killed in the massacre, which is pretty low. And that's because Walsingham has been able to provide them with sanctuary. He had also provided sanctuary to a Huguenot general who had been dragged out and hanged by royal troops. And even though Charles the Ninth had posted troops

• 21:57Speaker 00

  to guard Walsingham's residence, you know, there's no question that Walsingham had been in physical danger. He, his family, his servants, all the kind of people he'd offered refuge to. And for days after the massacre, as he was kind of driving around the streets of Paris in his carriage, the mob would hurl stones at him and yell abuse. And I think the memories of everything that he witnessed stayed with him to the rest of his life, as they would. I think when you, you know, have 5,000 of your co-religionists slaughtered in the streets, I mean, that's something you're not going to get over easily.

• 22:29Speaker 01

  Exactly. Especially, well, if you're under threat yourself, right?

• 22:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, completely. And, and someone else who was, who was there with him was his, his brother-in-law, a guy called Robert Beale, who'd been serving Walsingham as his secretary in Paris. And Beale wrote a kind of memorandum and he summed up the lessons that he was drawing and applied it to England. I think it time and more than time for us to awake out of our dead sleep and take heed lest like mischief, as has already overwhelmed the brethren and neighbours in France and Flanders, embrace us. So in other words, what Catholics have done in Paris,

• 23:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:06Speaker 00

  if we give them the chance, they will do the same in London.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  That appeal to wake up. We've been asleep, we must wake out of our dead sleep. I mean, that's so common in history.

• 23:15Speaker 00

  Wake up sheeple.

• 23:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. So not long after the massacre, Walsingham comes back to London, doesn't he, from his ambassadorial posting? And we talked in the previous episode about the parallels with the Cold War. And he is like one of these, you know, American diplomats like George Kennan or somebody in the 1940s and 1950s, who had been in Moscow and then came back and said, right, I've seen the beast up close. It's actually worse than you think. You know, we're in an existential life or death struggle with an implacable, sinister adversary. You know, he is, he has come back, if anything, more hawkish.

• 23:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, definitely.

• 23:53Speaker 01

  than when he went. And then Lord Burghley gives him a new job and a very, an absolutely crucial new job.

• 23:59Speaker 00

  Well, basically Burghley gives him his old job. So Lord Burghley had been Principal Secretary to Elizabeth. And he's now, in, in 1572, he'd been promoted to become the Lord Treasurer. So effectively Prime Minister, First Lord of the Treasury. And so Walsingham now is serving as Principal Secretary, which in effect means that in addition to handling all the kind of, you know, the foreign affairs and things like that, he is basically now the Queen's Spymaster. And as the Queen's Spymaster, he is responsible for the monitoring and the repression of treasonous activity in England. So to put it in modern parlance, he's the head of MI5.

• 24:38Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 24:39Speaker 00

  And he has a lot more tools to prosecute this war against sedition than Cecil had had at the beginning of, of his term as Chief Secretary. Because the, there's been kind of legislative beefing up since the Pope's excommunication of Elizabeth. So in 1571, one year after the papal bull excommunicating the Queen, Parliament had passed a new treason act, which made it illegal to call Elizabeth, and I quote, heretic, schismatic, tyrant, infidel, or an usurper of the crown. And clearly, you don't criminalise people using language like that unless they really have been using it. So clearly people have been

• 25:21Speaker 00

  calling Elizabeth all those words. They also introduced an Act Against Fugitives Over the Sea, which required the immediate return to England of anyone who had gone abroad without the specific permission of the government. And they also introduced the kind of laws, I imagine, I mean, I doubt that Sarah Malley, the new Archbishop of Canterbury, would personally be keen on these, but it might be one way to revive the Church of England. Because the laws that are passed under Elizabeth, against recusants, they're called, so people who recuse, or people who refuse to attend the services of the Protestant Church of England. They can be imprisoned without trial, simply on the orders of the Privy Council.

• 26:03Speaker 01

  Just a question. Elizabeth has been Queen now for quite a while.

• 26:06Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 26:06Speaker 01

  12, 13 years, right?

• 26:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:08Speaker 01

  Why are there people still calling her a usurper of the crown? That seems odd to me. I can understand there would be some Catholics who would call her a heretic or a schismatic. But she's been there a long time. She's been there longer than Mary was Queen.

• 26:22Speaker 00

  Because if she is an illegitimate Queen, as the Pope has said, one of the reasons for that illegitimacy isn't just her religion, it's also the fact that she is the daughter of a bastard, Anne Boleyn. So Anne Boleyn is seen as a whore. And so she is called the great whore and Elizabeth is called the little whore.

• 26:42Speaker 01

  Of course. I'm just surprised that it's now quite a long, you know, people don't live that long in the 16th century. It's quite a long time since Anne Boleyn was around. You know, I know memories die hard, but it's surprising to me that there is obviously a significant minority of people who are still questioning Elizabeth's right to rule.

• 27:01Speaker 00

  I don't think it's surprising at all, because I think that the propaganda war on both sides is heating up. And that's always the way that when you have two ideologically opposed points of view.

• 27:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:13Speaker 00

  Both sides serve to radicalise the other.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  How are they exposed to Catholic propaganda? Because surely the government is making, straining every sinew to make sure that Catholic propaganda is not distributed.

• 27:24Speaker 00

  We are going to be coming to that because the elision between Catholicism and treason, which those laws are, are pretty explicitly making.

• 27:36Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 27:37Speaker 00

  Is something that increasingly by the 1570s is starting to animate wolf people like Walsingham.

• 27:44Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 27:44Speaker 00

  They feel that this, this sense of a conspiracy between Catholics in England and Catholics in the broader world, in Europe, that far from dying down, as the hope had been, that it's becoming worse and worse and worse, that Catholics are essentially being radicalised. And that they are looking to the Catholic powers beyond England for succor and support. And that's not just financial, it's also in terms of kind of ideology. And we will see the extent to which this is true, because this is pretty much what this episode today is going to be about. And conversely, for people like Walsingham, for Cecil, or Burghley, again, they are becoming more and more nervous of English Catholics and seeing them as

• 28:28Speaker 00

  more and more of a menace. Because Catholics who remain true to their faith, even if they are, you know, simultaneously loyal to Elizabeth, and lots of English Catholics remain loyal to Elizabeth, they are being cast by this kind of, you know, the nervous security apparatus of the Protestant regime as agents of foreign powers, of agents of the Pope, of the kings of, of Spain and of France. And so therefore, Walsingham's duties as chief intelligencer to the Queen requires him to keep an eye not just on the Catholics in England, but also on the continent. And so effectively, he is working as head of MI6 as well as of MI5. And this is a challenge for him. Because even though Walsingham has inherited Burghley's

• 29:11Speaker 00

  intelligence networks, these were not institutional in the way that, say, the intelligence networks of Venice were. So Venice had always employed spies and agents and informants across Europe. Walsingham doesn't have anything like that. There isn't really a kind of MI5 or MI6 for him to take over. He's got to kind of build it. And the problem is that, you know, we compared England to Iran in, in the 21st century in our previous episode. England is very isolated and also relatively poor, doesn't have the kind of the reach and the scope, say, of the agents employed by Philip the Second. You know, Philip is, rules this

• 29:53Speaker 00

  vast Europe-wide empire, he's very rich, he has agents everywhere, he can afford to pay those agents in places where he doesn't rule directly. The Queen is stingy, you know, she's not providing Walsingham with enormous amounts of money. But because Walsingham is a true believer, he invests his own personal fortune in his work. And Robert Beale, his, his brother-in-law, his kind of secretary, he's become Secretary to the Privy Council on his return from Paris. You know, he, he notes Walsingham's financial as well as ideological commitment to the cause with great admiration. He, he wrote, "Mr Secretary Walsingham, with Her Majesty's allowance and his own purse, had recruited agents in 40 locations overseas." So that's pretty impressive. And some of these agents are working at, in the very

• 30:38Speaker 00

  heart of foreign governments. So Beale noted in particular those that betrayed the secrets of both the French and Scottish dealings. So lots of agents in the Scottish court and in the French court. But the hardest nuts to crack are the most menacing. And one of these is Spain, the most formidable power. The English don't, you know, the English intelligence services find it difficult to plant agents in Philip's court. And the other, of course, is the papacy, which is an institution with which England obviously has no diplomatic relations at all. And so Walsingham tries to get round this problem. Beale, again, in his report, notes, "With money, he corrupted priests and traitors to betray the practices against this realm."

• 31:23Speaker 00

  And towards the end of the 1570s, he actually, he kind of contemplated a mad scheme to kidnap a papal nuncio to France. So he was going to use huguenot pirates to kidnap this papal nuncio and bring him to England and kind of interrogate him. And Burleigh, who, you know, generally, I mean, loves a scheme to foil the Pope, he said, no, this is mad. He nixed, he nixed the plot. And so people may, well, why was Walsingham prepared to countenance such a kind of reckless scheme? And the reason is that he fears a great new crisis is brewing for the Queen and for the cause of true religion, because he is the intelligence chief, he is closer to the reports of his agents now than Burleigh is. And he is abreast of very alarming news

• 32:07Speaker 00

  reaching him of developments in Rome, where it seems that a new stage in the papacy's campaign against Elizabeth and Protestant England is being prepared. And Rome, you know, it goes without saying, for Protestants, is the absolute sump of everything that is most hellish in Europe at this point. So there's a Protestant spy in England who ultimately ended up as a playwright, kind of like Marlon and Shakespeare. And he wrote this poem about Rome. It's the sea of sin, the beast with sevenfold head, the shop wherein all shame is sold and bought, the cup whence poison

• 32:45Speaker 00

  through the world is spread. And in the early 1570s, there is one particular poison that is giving Walsingham a special headaches, the most toxic poison in Christendom, in Walsingham's opinion. And this is administered by the most brilliant, the most committed, the most dangerous of all Elizabeth's enemies. And these are enemies who are preparing for the first time, if Walsingham's intelligence is accurate, to bring their campaign against the Queen directly

• 33:24Speaker 00

  to English soil. And these enemies, Dominic, are enemies whose very name is sufficient to chill the soul of any devout Protestant. These enemies are the Jesuits.

• 33:41Speaker 01

  Oh, no. Well, we'll come back after the break and we will welcome to the rest of history, some of the worst people who've ever lived, the Jesuits.

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• 36:35Speaker 01

  Welcome back to The Rest is History. It is September 1579. We are in the sump of sin, we are in Rome itself, and we're at a dinner in a place called the English College. And this is a seminary where English students can train for the Catholic priesthood. And the guest of honour at this dinner is a man who Francis Walsingham, spymaster to Elizabeth I, regards as his most dangerous enemy, putting on one side Mary, Queen of Scots. And the name of this man is William Allen. He is a Catholic priest, he is a scholar, and like the co-founder of

• 37:15Speaker 01

  Goalhanger, Tony Pasta, he is a man of Lancashire. So a man of Lancashire, educated at Oxford, so he's very like Tony Pasta.

• 37:23Speaker 00

  Well, in some ways.

• 37:24Speaker 01

  Listeners can tell straight away that this is going to be a very bad man. Tell us about William Allen and why he's such a bad man, Tom. He's got a mole, hasn't he?

• 37:32Speaker 00

  He's got a mole, he's got a reddish beard. I mean, it's all stacking up. He's very tall, he's very slim, he's in his late 40s. As you said, he'd been a brilliant student at Oxford, then he'd been a fellow at Oriole College. So a great, you know, glittering academic career there. But because he's a very devout Catholic, when Elizabeth comes in and establishes the Protestant settlement, he can't put up with it. And so he leaves England and goes into permanent exile. And when he's in exile, he sets up seminaries with the aim of training English Catholic priests who can then be sent back to England. And the first of these seminaries he sets up at Dowie in the Low Countries, and the second one at Reims in France. So you were

• 38:16Speaker 00

  asking, you know, how are people in England being kept abreast of all these developments? It's these priests who are being sent by, trained and sent by William Allen to England, their aim is to kind of keep alive the flame of recusancy in England, to give mass to Catholics and to succour them and to let them know that they haven't been abandoned by the Catholic powers of Europe. But also if they can, to try and to make conversions. So I guess, you know, again, pursuing the kind of Cold War analogy, KGB agents in Britain, they were kind of there to establish links with pre-existing communists, but also to recruit agents, say,

• 38:57Speaker 00

  in, you know, Cambridge or the civil service or whatever. And so these priests have been going to England. Obviously, it's incredibly dangerous. But they come in large numbers. So the first four priests sent by Allen had arrived in England in 1574, and more had followed over the succeeding years. So by 1579, Allen has around 100 priests kind of working undercover in England, working to keep the flame of Catholicism alive. But now, you know, he's come to Rome to hold this dinner because he wants to turbocharge this mission. And he's come to Rome because he wants the Pope's personal backing for the acceleration of this

• 39:38Speaker 00

  mission. And nine days before this dinner with which we opened the second half, he'd had an interview with the Pope, and the Pope had given the green light, had given his blessing to this great project. And at the same time, Allen is a brilliant networker, very, very skilled in the arts of diplomacy. He's been assiduous in fostering close links with Philip II of Spain, and has actually persuaded him to sponsor an invasion of Ireland. And Elizabeth is the Queen of England and Wales, but she is also the Queen of Ireland. So this is an invasion of her backyard. And that evening at dinner, the dinner being held in Rome in mid-September 1579.

• 40:20Speaker 00

  Alan gives his fellow guests the great news. You know, the Pope is on board. He's given us more funding. An invasion force with Spanish soldiers has landed in Ireland. It's all great. It's all kicking off. Things are really, really looking up. And Stephen Alford wrote a brilliant book about the kind of the espionage war called The Watchers.

• 40:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, The Watchers, great book.

• 40:47Speaker 00

  He describes the speech that Alan gave. It must have been extraordinary and moving, revealing his persuasive power to inspire and to motivate, which no one ever doubts. I mean, that's why Walsingham sees him as such a dangerous foe. And six priests sign up to the mission to England that very evening. And Alan says, you will be going to England in, you know, just a few months at the start of 1580. So that's great. There are those six priests, but there is also another priest there who needs no encouragement whatsoever to plan for a mission to England. And this is a guy called Robert Persons, who is in his early 30s. And like you, Dominic, he is a bailio man. And like you, he is bold, formidable and charismatic.

• 41:31Speaker 01

  Oh, thanks.

• 41:32Speaker 00

  Unlike you, however.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's a priest.

• 41:34Speaker 00

  He's a priest. He'd been ordained a priest only the year before. And not just any kind of priest, because specifically he had been ordained a priest of the Society of Jesus. So shorthand, a Jesuit.

• 41:47Speaker 01

  Right. So tell us a little bit about the Jesuits, because they are, they're about 40 years old at this point, aren't they?

• 41:53Speaker 00

  They're a religious order.

• 41:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, poverty, chastity, obedience. But what marks them out is this kind of fanatical loyalty to the Pope, right?

• 42:01Speaker 00

  Fanatical devotion to the Pope, I believe.

• 42:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 42:05Speaker 00

  Monty Python would put it. They are the kind of the shock troops who have been formed to combat the Reformation. And their vocation is to win souls for Christ in this last era of a declining and grasping world. And so they've travelled to the limits of the world. You know, they've gone to China. They go to Japan. People have seen Shogun. The priests in that are Jesuits.

• 42:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 42:30Speaker 00

  But Persons, who is English, he thinks, yeah, I mean, it's great sending priests off to China and Japan. But there's an obvious place where we need to make conversions. And this is my own native land, England. And so he has been pushing for this ever since he's become a Jesuit. So the whole year since his ordination. And his superior, the Jesuit general, is reluctant, because he doesn't really want to embroil the order in a mission that will be both very perilous and very controversial. I mean, it really is kind of plunging your hand into the magimix. But Persons is very, very determined. And so he has joined forces with Alan.

• 43:14Speaker 00

  And the pair of them have been pushing for this kind of great mission to England. And Alan is very keen, you know, he welcomes Persons with with open arms, because he kind of admires them as the, you know, the spiritual elite of the Counter-Reformation, the kind of the very sharpest edge. And so over the next few months after this dinner, Alan and Persons refine their plans. And the Pope gives them more funds and secret documents are drawn up, detailing lists of English Catholics who are in exile and so therefore readily contactable, and who are ready to join the King of Spain in an invasion of England. And the conspirators, when they discuss this plot, they talk very openly,

• 43:56Speaker 00

  because they they know that they're among friends, that there are no kind of listeners eavesdropping. They talk openly of the joy that they would feel at seeing, and I quote, "the Spaniards lords of England and Elizabeth Tudor, mistress Bess, as they call her, shaked of her estate." And William Allen leaves Rome with this kind of band of priests, this kind of shock force of undercover agents who will be crossing into England. They leave Rome on the 25th of February, 1580. So it is all kicking off.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  But there is a particular man with them, isn't there, who listeners might want to pay attention to? And this is a man called Charles Sled, who has come along as a kind of fixer and a courier for them. And he's, he's a sort of nondescript man. He's literate. He's very effective. He's was once an apprentice to a merchant. He had been in Rome since the previous summer. He had gone to St. Peter's for confession. And then he'd begun working as a servant for an English Catholic churchman in Rome. And how has he got involved? How has he got involved with this party? Why is he with them?

• 45:09Speaker 00

  Yeah. So he's in his mid 20s. He's English. He's come to Rome because he's a Catholic, or so he says. And he's taken confession, which demonstrates that he must be a Catholic. And so as an English Catholic, he's looking around for a job and he gets his job with an English churchman in Rome. And that means that when this English churchman hosts dinners, Charles Sled is in attendance. And William Allen and Robert Persons are regular attendees at these dinners. And Sled is there, you know, kind of like a waiter. He's kind of hovering with the wine. No one's paying any attention to him. But of course, he can listen to everything that is being said.

• 45:51Speaker 00

  And Alan does spot him and realizes that he's kind of very able. I mean, he's got all the qualities that you would want in a good servant. And so when Alan heads off with the with the Jesuits from Rome bound for England, Sled goes with them and often is riding ahead of them to fix rooms and to take letters for Alan and things like that. So by the 6th of April, before Alan arrives in Paris, Sled is already there. And then soon afterwards, he's in Reims, which is of course, home of one of the two seminaries set up by by Alan. And then shortly after that, he pops up in Rouen, which is one of the main centres of English Catholic exiles in France. And everywhere he goes, he's carrying letters from Alan.

• 46:36Speaker 00

  And then he's taking letters back to Alan and the fellow conspirators. And he is attending their meetings, you know, he's laying the table, he's pouring the wine, he's serving the food. And he's listening to their homilies and he's listening to all the details of their conspiracies. And he's a tremendous fellow to have around. And what a blessing it is for William Allen and the Jesuits and the various priests to have him on hand. And then abruptly in mid May, Sled vanishes. And people may be wondering, where has he gone, this trusted servant of William Allen? And I think that the answer to anyone who has read Le Carre will come as no surprise whatsoever,

• 47:17Speaker 00

  because on the afternoon of 17th of May, he pops up in London at the Court in Westminster. And at the Court in Westminster, Charles Sled, if that was indeed his name, is ushered into the presence of Francis Walsingham.

• 47:37Speaker 01

  I mean, listeners must have heard this coming when they heard you talking about his eye for detail. And he's brilliant, master of recall, and he can keep a secret and all of this kind of thing. And effectively, what he now does is he hands over to Francis Walsingham all the details, all the inside dope on Alan and the Jesuit operation. So he's got lists of names, right? He's got, what, 300 English Catholic names on this list? These are people on whom Alan said, we can rely, we can contact these people. And Sled just gives all this to Francis Walsingham.

• 48:10Speaker 00

  Yeah. So it's details of the pensions they're getting from the Pope, and also very, very vivid physical descriptions. And Stephen Alford in The Watchers, which is absolute, I mean, it's such a brilliant book, so gripping. He describes this list as the most complete reference work then available on Queen Elizabeth's enemies. So it's like downloading a massive database and then uploading it so that you know all your enemy agents that you're up against.

• 48:34Speaker 01

  Sort of WikiLeaks type thing.

• 48:35Speaker 00

  Yeah. So Robert Beale, so Walsingham's brother-in-law and kind of right-hand man, Secretary of the Privy Council. He writes it up and prepares it for distribution to particularly trusted members of the Privy Council. So it's so sensitive that not everybody gets it. And he just titles it Priests and Seminaries Beyond the Seas. You know, this is the key to combating these kind of enemy agents that are coming to England. And this dossier, when Walsingham reads it, and he's got Sled's reports of everything that these priests have been talking about in Rome, whether, you know, Alan was talking about Spanish invasions of Ireland and England and so on. I mean, it just reinforces him in his conviction that that England is at war.

• 49:20Speaker 00

  And that the priests that Alan is sending to England might protest that they are, they're not political agents. They are coming to minister to souls. But this is just equivocation. I mean, the Jesuits are notorious for equivocation among Protestants. And this is undoubtedly, I think, how Walsingham sees this kind of talk. Walsingham sees these priests and the Jesuits perhaps in particular as just ardent traitors. They're agents of the Pope, but they're also agents of the King of Spain, who is a foreign head of state. And they are conspiring against their anointed queen. So it's treason. So he's going to be targeting them not for their religious beliefs, but as traitors.

• 50:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 50:05Speaker 00

  And so this is why Elizabeth is not burning Catholics in the way that her sister had done. She's learnt that lesson. That's bad. If you were up against enemies who are motivated by religious reasons, you don't condemn them for their religious reasons. You condemn them for treason, for being traitors to their anointed queen.

• 50:25Speaker 01

  So for Walsingham now, it's a manhunt, right? To track down these conspirators.

• 50:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, because he loves hunting. He's, I mean, he's not a man who has much time for sport. But the sport he loves is hair coursing, so hunting hairs with dogs. But now, yes, basically, it's a, it's a manhunt.

• 50:43Speaker 01

  And he's got two people in particular that he's after. So one of them is the bailio man you already mentioned, Robert Persons, and the other is Robert Persons's deputy, who is a Londoner called Edmund Campion, who ends up becoming a great hero, doesn't he, to Catholics?

• 50:55Speaker 00

  Yes. So he's a very, very impressive man. I mean, almost everything about him is impressive. So unlike William Allen, Campion had initially accepted the Protestant settlement. He'd gone to Oxford, where he'd been the most brilliant student of his day. He had formally welcomed Elizabeth to the university and Elizabeth had been very impressed with him. So too had William Cecil, who will become Lord Burghley and had kind of adopted him as a protege. But Campion starts to have doubts. And in 1569, he leaves Oxford and he goes to Dublin. So it's part of Elizabeth's realms. It is easier to be a Catholic there than it is

• 51:39Speaker 00

  in England at this point. And he starts to embark on a process of of conversion, or maybe reconversion, you should say. And then he ends up in Dowie, which is one of William Allen's two seminaries. And in 1571, he's formally welcomed back into the Catholic Church. And two years later, he sets off on foot for Rome, where he becomes a Jesuit. And it's there in 1580 that he is recruited by Persons for the mission to England. And actually, Campion hadn't wanted to go. He agreed with the Jesuit general. This was provocative to send the Jesuits into England. But, you know, he's taken his vow of obedience, so he has to go. And so he, and so off he sets.

• 52:23Speaker 00

  And you might think that if they're going undercover into England, that Persons and Campion would, as they, they head from Rome towards the Channel, that they'd be doing it in a kind of stealthy manner, a clandestine manner, but not a bit of it. So Campion writes to his superior back in Rome, saying that they were being accompanied by something positively like a clamour. Because everyone knows they're coming, they're massive celebrities. And their mission is seen by Catholics as something heroic and thrilling. And so despite themselves, they are celebrities even before they have arrived in England.

• 52:57Speaker 01

  Reckless.

• 52:58Speaker 00

  It is reckless, but maybe also a kind of challenge to the Protestant establishment, that we are coming as priests. And neither Walsingham nor Burley have any doubt as to particularly Campion's capabilities. You know, he's, we said he's intellectually brilliant. He has this amazing personal magnetism. He's a very warm, charming man. Everybody thinks this. And also this incredible sense of conviction that is total, but not alienating in the way that a kind of fanatical conviction is. So he is very, he convinces people without seeming kind of swivel-eyed.

• 53:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's a true believer, but he's not mad, which is an important distinction. You're not going to recoil from him in the street.

• 53:44Speaker 00

  Yeah. So all these qualities, of course, just make him seem more dangerous to, to Walsingham. And the fact that the Jesuits are coming to England at this specific moment in particular makes them seem sinister. So in Ireland, remember that invasion force that had been sent with the Spanish soldiers? They're still in the field and they've been swollen by Irish Catholic rebels who have flocked to the, actually, the banner specifically of the Pope, because an English papal nuncio has landed and is preaching holy war against the heretic Jezebel on the English throne. And so to quote Jessie Charles in her wonderful prize-winning book, God's Traitors, which is all about the, the recusants in Elizabethan England.

• 54:27Speaker 00

  From the government's viewpoint, it looked very much as though Campion and Persons were papal Spanish agents bent on subversion, not conversion. The Jesuits say it's about conversion. Walsingham and Burley say, no, this is subversion.

• 54:42Speaker 01

  But they would be right to say that, wouldn't they? I mean, conversion and subversion are the same thing.

• 54:47Speaker 00

  If you are a Protestant minister of Queen Elizabeth, indisputably.

• 54:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:53Speaker 00

  If you are a Catholic priest, I think you could say, well, I'm doing God's will.

• 54:58Speaker 01

  But it's a fine distinction because the Pope has excommunicated the Queen. I mean, that's surely the killer detail.

• 55:03Speaker 00

  You are not wrong. And, and Campion keeps very quiet about this.

• 55:07Speaker 01

  Because you can, you cannot possibly say, oh, well, this is, this is politically neutral. We're just, you know.

• 55:13Speaker 00

  Dominic, you absolutely can, and they do.

• 55:15Speaker 01

  They do say that, but people don't believe them.

• 55:17Speaker 00

  Well, certainly the Protestant authorities don't believe them. And I suspect quite a lot of the Catholics don't believe them either. But this is, this is what they are saying. So you can see how essentially there is a kind of ideological opposition. And you can see that the question of what is their motivation? Is it to convert or is it to subvert? Is absolutely what is at stake in this whole episode, absolutely crucial. So they've arrived in the Channel ports. Now they've got the problem of how do they get over? Persons is the first to make the crossing and he sets out from Calais to Dover on the 16th of June, 1580. And he has adopted a policy of wildly extravagant disguise. So he's dressed up as a kind of Blood and Thunder mercenary.

• 56:01Speaker 00

  He's got a leather coat that's trimmed with gold braid. He's got a feather in his cap, massively fanboy, and I think he's just a natural ham.

• 56:10Speaker 01

  It's a good disguise, though.

• 56:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a really good disguise because, you know, he's described by, by a Catholic as being such a peacock, such a swaggerer. And so no one thinks for a minute that he could possibly be a priest. And so he crosses with no problem at all. Then Campion follows the, a week later, and he's disguised himself as a jeweler from Dublin, because of course he'd spent time in Dublin, so he's, he's familiar with it. And he gets stopped because he resembles William Allen's brother, who had been on SLED's list that he'd handed over to Walsingham. And so he does get apprehended and for reasons that aren't entirely clear, they don't keep him. So he, he manages to, to carry on from, from Dover. And he arrives in London, where he rendezvues with Persons.

• 56:56Speaker 00

  And Persons and Campion, for the next few weeks, are then touring safe houses across the capital. And they're preaching and they're celebrating mass and they're hosting conferences with leading English Catholics, who are overjoyed to have these two very charismatic figures directly from the Pope in London. And Campion, you know, he understands Dominic where Walsingham and you are coming from. He knows that he is being accused of treason. And so he writes a formal letter explicitly denying this charge and insisting that he's come only, and I quote, "to preach the gospel, to minister the sacraments, to instruct the simple, to reform sinners, to confute errors."

• 57:40Speaker 00

  And his instructions to his fellow Catholics are, should I be captured? Then send this letter to the Privy Council so that they can read and see what my motivation is. The problem with this is that it's a brilliantly well-written letter. I mean, everything Campion does is brilliant. And so Catholics read it and they go, oh, this is great. We should share it. And so they start copying it. And so inevitably it falls into the hands of Walsingham's agents. To English Catholics, this letter is a great rallying cry. They find it very moving and inspirational. But to Walsingham and to the Protestant authorities more generally, this letter is not reassuring in the slightest. It seems a really terrifying provocation. And you can see why.

• 58:24Speaker 00

  So this is also what Campion has written. "The expense is reckoned, the enterprise is begun, it is of God, it cannot be withstood. So the faith was planted, so it must be restored." And how do you restore it? You restore it by getting rid of the Protestant Jezebel and planting the Catholic Queen of Scots on the throne. And so unsurprisingly, among Protestants, the letter is very soon notorious and they call it Campion's brag.

• 58:53Speaker 01

  Do you think that's unfair? Do you think, I mean, he's not saying anything, just, just reading it. I mean, of course, there's a sort of, you might say there's kind of an ideological arrogance to it. You know, we're.

• 59:03Speaker 00

  Well, he's a Jesuit.

• 59:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. But, but.

• 59:06Speaker 00

  Ideological arrogance is the whole point of being, I suppose, the kind of, you know, a, a part of a religious shock force.

• 59:13Speaker 01

  But I'm surprised that they're so provoked by it.

• 59:16Speaker 00

  I think it's because he was one of their own. He's writing in the style of an Oxford-educated Protestant, but he's turning their weapons against them. I mean, again, you know, to draw the analogy with the Cambridge Traitors, that's what's kind of shocking to the British establishment, was that chaps who'd been to decent colleges and belonged to clubs in St James's had been working for the communists. And so I think there's an element of that, that this is a very, very well-written letter. And they know that Campion is unbelievably smart and therefore he, you know, they can read between the lines. They know what he's getting at.

• 59:56Speaker 01

  And you compared him with the Cambridge Traitors. I mean, he, he, he acquires this sort of, I don't know, Kim Philby-style reputation, doesn't he? As a man who is, there's a kind of charisma, a sort of, you know, that fascinates his enemies as much as his adherents.

• 1:00:12Speaker 00

  I mean, Kim Philby is an evil man who betrayed lots of people to their deaths. Campion is not doing that. Campion is a very brave, committed, heroic man, I think, who absolutely believes what he's doing.

• 1:00:24Speaker 01

  But he has a similar grip on the imagination that somebody like Philby had.

• 1:00:28Speaker 00

  I mean, if you're saying he's very charismatic, then yes. But he, he, he becomes a hero to Catholics because they see him, which I think he is, as a, as a principled and heroic man, who is touring. You know, he leaves London, he tours Berkshire, Oxfordshire, Northamptonshire, so the kind of the countryside. He's preaching in barns and he's attracting ever-swelling congregations. You know, he has a touch of the stardust. People want to come and hear him. And undoubtedly, you know, he is getting converts. He, and he's offering reassurance to Catholics who've been oppressed for a decade and a half now. And of course, he's always on the move. He's always having to put on disguises, which Campion himself regards as ridiculous.

• 1:01:11Speaker 00

  But, you know, for months and months, he's not caught and the whole Protestant spy agency are looking out for him. So he, that also adds to his kind of glamour, I think. The sense of him as, you know, as a kind of secret agent as well as a priest. And then on the 27th of June, 1581, so by this point, he's been there, you know, almost a year.

• 1:01:33Speaker 00

  He throws down a very dramatic gauntlet by having an open challenge to the Queen printed and distributed across Oxford. And again, he is kind of tweaking the nose of the Protestant establishment. So he writes in this pamphlet, "Listen, Elizabeth, mighty Queen, the prophet in speaking to thee is teaching thee thy duty." That is bound to seem provocative, I think, of course, to people like Walsingham. And so Walsingham says, come on, this is, this is going beyond a joke. We have to get this guy. And it's clear by now that he is starting to kind of leave a trail. And he's captured three weeks later on the 17th of July at a requisites house called Lifford Grange in

• 1:02:17Speaker 00

  Berkshire. And actually, the people who are coming to, who find him were not specifically looking for him. They were looking for other priests. But he is found after a two day search, hiding in a priest hall with these two other priests. And the guy who has led them there is a very sinister figure called George Elliot. So he's the spy catcher. And he's a Catholic apostate who, you know, as is the way so often with apostates, are keen to, he's keen to prove himself more Protestant than the Protestants. And he has been playing on the Privy Council's paranoia. You know, he's been really bigging up all the stuff about plots and things funded by the Pope, assassinations of Elizabeth. I think coming up with material that wasn't actually true. And he very shrewdly tells Burleigh and Walsingham

• 1:03:02Speaker 00

  that they're in line to be murdered as well. So that kind of adds to their sense of urgency in trying to find these priests. And so when Campion is brought out from the priest hall, you know, he is not treated well, which is what you would expect. So he's, his elbows are tied behind him. He's plonked on a horse. A sign is pinned to his hat, which reads Campion, the seditious Jesuit. And he is led straight to the Tower of London, where he is locked up in this hideous cell called Little Ease, which is a joke, because you can neither stretch nor rise to your feet. So he spends three days there. It must have been agony. But Little Ease is not to be the worst, because the rack is waiting. And

• 1:03:45Speaker 00

  people may be wondering, well, you know, what's the status of torture in England at this time? Torture is illegal. But at the same time, Walsingham is convinced that it has to be applied. So he had written to Burleigh in 1575, "Without torture, I know we shall not prevail."

• 1:04:05Speaker 01

  Golly, very war on terror.

• 1:04:07Speaker 00

  Kind of Dick Cheney, isn't he? What's it? Enhanced interrogation techniques. It's a no brainer. So I think for Walsingham, it's a no brainer. So Campion, in his brag, that letter he'd written that was meant to be private, but which had gone viral. He had declared his defiance of Elizabeth's judicial authorities by directly name checking the prospect of torture. So he'd said, "While we have a man left to enjoy your Tyburn, where people hang, or to be racked with torments, or to be consumed with your prisons, you know, we will keep coming." And he was right to dread what the, what the Protestant authorities would do, because in the Tower, he is repeatedly racked. And it's so brutal that he loses the use of his pen hand. So people may remember that Guy Fawkes, you

• 1:04:52Speaker 00

  know, you can look at the, his signature before and after he's been racked. Campion has it so badly that he can't even sign a paper. And when he's not being tortured, he's being subjected to various inquiries. So there's a judicial inquiry led by Robert Beale. There's a big theological debate, which is staged in the parish church of the Tower. And Campion is only allowed the Bible. So he's not allowed any other books, no, not no other reference books. And then there's a public trial is staged in Westminster Hall in November 1581. And throughout all these processes, the core argument is the one that we were talking about earlier. Is his mission a pastoral one? Or is it blatant

• 1:05:36Speaker 00

  treason? And this is, you know, they just keep going over and over and over it. And there's never really any doubt as to what the verdict is going to be. So on the 20th of November, Campion is convicted, not of heresy, not of any crime of conscience, but as an offender against a statute against treason that had been passed in the reign of Edward III, 220 years before. So he is convicted as a traitor.

• 1:06:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:07Speaker 00

  And on the 1st of December, he suffers the death of a traitor. So he is lashed onto a hurdle. He is taken from his prison to Tyburn, which is now Marble Arch in London, but was the traditional place for executions. And there he suffers the hideous, hideous death of a traitor. So he's hanged until he is almost dead. He's then cut down. He is still alive as his bowels and his genitals are cut off and pulled out and burnt in front of him. And then when he's dead, his body is quartered and the various quarters are dispatched to gateways around London. And Walsingham, and Burleigh, and the Privy

• 1:06:48Speaker 00

  Council, take a very, very grim satisfaction in Campion's fate, because it draws what seems to be a line under what had been a very grim year. So first, that rebellion in Ireland, we talked about the Spanish troops, the Papal Nuncio, that has been suppressed. It took place at a place called Smirwick in County Kerry, and all the Spanish troops had been satisfyingly massacred. And now the most dangerous papist agent that has been sent to England under Elizabeth has been captured, convicted, and killed. And of course, Persons is still on the scene, but he manages to, to slip away. And the

• 1:07:31Speaker 00

  flow of priests does continue into the country for the rest of Elizabeth's reign. But I think that Walsingham and his men now feel that they have the measure of what is going on. And over the course of Elizabeth's reign, 471 priests will end up being captured, and 116 of these will be executed. And the reason that the numbers are so high is because neither side is willing to abandon its respective strategy. Because both sides, I think, feel that the benefits they secure from what they're doing outweighs the costs.

• 1:08:12Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:08:13Speaker 00

  So for Walsingham's men, they are stopping the proselytization of potential Catholics. It's destroying a foreign funded campaign of subversion.

• 1:08:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:26Speaker 00

  For the Catholic priests, their deaths enshrines them as martyrs, and gives them what Protestants had been given under Mary Tudor. So to this day, Edward Campion and a lot of the Catholic priests who were executed under Elizabeth, you know, they're saints. They kind of give their names to rooms in Catholic schools and things like that. But the consequence for the climate in Elizabethan England is undoubtedly to generate a sense of paranoia, as you always do when there's a kind of espionage war going on.

• 1:09:02Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:09:02Speaker 00

  And because this is a specifically Christian espionage war, it gives people on both sides, Catholics and Protestants, a sense that they're living in the shadow of a kind of great cosmic drama.

• 1:09:15Speaker 01

  But a drama that's not just playing out in the shadows, Tom. It's not just a story about spies and back rooms and priest halls and double agents, is it? It's also a story of swashbuckling sea dogs.

• 1:09:28Speaker 00

  It is.

• 1:09:28Speaker 01

  And that's what we'll be turning to next time. So in the next episode, from the coast of California to the Straits of Magellan, we will be venturing onto the marine front in the ideological struggle between Protestantism and Catholicism. And in particular, we will be heading onto the Pacific Ocean with one of the greatest figures of the Elizabethan Age, not an controversial figure these days, and that is Sir Francis Drake. So loads of excitement, loads of rough action, loads of swashbuckling swordplay to come next time. Now, if you remember the Rest is History Club, you may well be in, on the Pacific Ocean

• 1:10:11Speaker 01

  as we speak. You may have not even been listening to this, because you may be already listening to that episode right now, because you can, of course, because you get all the episodes early. If you're not a member of the Rest is History Club, and you'd like to be part of our own shadowy cabal of sinister conspirators, then you just need to head to therestishistory.com to sign up. And of course, that's the only way you'll get the host of unbelievable benefits. And there are other ways to sign up, but only through the website, therestishistory.com, do you get the cornucopia of delights that we offer our members. And of course, the other thing you can do is to sign up to our free newsletter. And there you get all kinds of absolutely riveting articles, interviews, book extracts, and more.

• 1:10:51Speaker 00

  We're also doing a live show, aren't we, about the ultimate Victorian adventure, which is the Abyssinian Expedition of 1868, all kicked off when the Abyssinian Emperor wrote letters to Queen Victoria, and she neglected to reply. He got in a massive strop, and chaos ensued.

• 1:11:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's absolutely amazing story. It's one of the most lurid, implausible, and entertaining of all 19th century imperial adventures. So I'm really looking forward to the show.

• 1:11:19Speaker 00

  It's very Flashman, isn't it?

• 1:11:20Speaker 01

  There's a Flashman book about it, Flashman on the March.

• 1:11:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, it's the ideal Flashman story, if you like Flashman. And even if you don't, it's still brilliant. Anyway, that is at the South Bank in London on Friday the 4th of September. And you can get tickets, once again, at therestishistory.com. I think you should just bookmark restishistory.com and buy everything it's got to offer.

• 1:11:41Speaker 01

  So on that bombshell, we'll be back next time with Sir Francis Drake. Goodbye.

• 1:11:46Speaker 00

  Bye bye.

• 1:11:57Speaker 02

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