God's Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests and the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot

by Alice Hogge

Overview

A thrilling account of treachery, loyalty and martyrdom in Elizabethan England from an exceptional new writer.As darkness fell on the evening of Friday, 28 October 1588, just weeks after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, two young Englishmen landed in secret on a Norfolk beach. They were Jesuit priests. Their aim was to achieve by force of argument what the Armada had failed to do by force of arms: return England to the Catholic Church.Eighteen years later their mission had been shattered by the actions of a small group of terrorists, the Gunpowder Plotters; they themselves had been accused of designing ‘that most horrid and hellish conspiracy’; and the future of every Catholic they had come to save depended on the silence of an Oxford joiner, builder of priest-holes, being tortured in the Tower of London.‘God’s Secret Agents’ tells the story of Elizabeth’s ‘other’ England, a country at war with an unseen enemy, a country peopled – according to popular pamphlets and Government proclamations – with potential traitors, fifth-columnists and assassins. And it tells this story from the perspective of that unseen ‘enemy’, England’s Catholics, a beleaguered, alienated minority, struggling to uphold its faith.Ultimately, ‘God’s Secret Agents’ is the story of men who would die for their cause undone by men who would kill for it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780007346134
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	09/17/2009
Sold by:	HarperCollins Publishers
Format:	eBook
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	750,075
File size:	593 KB

About the Author

Alice Hogge was educated at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. She lives in London. This is her first book.

Alice Hogge was educated at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. She lives in London. This is her first book.

Read an Excerpt

God's Secret Agents

Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests and the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot

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By Alice Hogge

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Copyright © 2005 Alice Hogge
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0060542276

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Chapter One

' ... as the waves of the sea, without stay, do one rise and overtake another, so the Pope and his ... ministers be never at rest, but as fast as one enterprise faileth they take another in hand... hoping at last to prevail.'
Sir Walter Mildmay MP, October 1586

Armada Year, 1558, swept in on a flood tide of historical prophecies and dire predictions. For the numerologists, who divided the Christian calendar into vast, looping cycles of time, constructed in multiples of seven and ten and based on the Revelation of St John and the bloodier parts of the Book of Isaiah, the year offered nothing less than the opening of the Seventh Seal, the overthrow of Antichrist and the sounding of the trumpets for the Last Judgement.

For the fifteenth century mathematician Regiomontanus, although he had not been quite so specific about the year's unfolding, still the promise of a solar eclipse in February, and not one but two lunar eclipses in March and August had not, he had thought, augured well. Regiomontanus had recorded his findings in Latin verse, concluding: 'If, this year, total catastrophe does not befall, if land and sea do not collapse in total ruin, yet will the whole world suffer in upheavals, empires will dwindle and from everywhere will be great lamentation.' As the year began, in Prague the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, himself a keen astrologer, scanned the heavens for signs that his was not the empire to which Regiomontanus referred. He could discover little more than that the weather that year would be unseasonably bad.

The printers of Amsterdam rang in the year with a special edition of their annual almanac, detailing in lurid prose the coming disasters: tempests and floods, midsummer snowstorms, darkness at midday, rain clouds of blood, monstrous births, and strange convulsions of the earth. On a more positive note, they suggested that things would calm down a bit after August and that late autumn might even be lucky for some, but this was not a January horoscope many read with pleasure.

In Spain and Portugal the sailors assembling along the western seaboard talked of little else, no matter that their King, His Most Catholic Majesty Philip II of Spain, regarded all attempts to divine the future as impious. In Lisbon a fortune-teller was arrested for 'making false and discouraging predictions', but the arrest came too late: the year had already begun with a flurry of naval desertions. In the Basque ports Philip's recruiting drive slowed and halted 'because of many strange and frightening portents that are rumoured'.

In Rome it was brought to the attention of Pope Sixtus V that a recent earth tremor in England had just disgorged an ancient marble slab, concealed for centuries beneath the crypt of Glastonbury Abbey, on which were written in letters of fire the opening words of Regiomontanus' prediction. It was felt by the papal agent who delivered this report that the mathematician could not, therefore, be the original author of the verses and that the prophecy could stem from one source only: from the magician Merlin. It was the first hint that God might be on the side of the English.

But in England no one mentioned Merlin's intervention in international affairs and the English almanacs that year were strangely muted affairs, proffering the general observation that 'Here and in the quarters following might be noted ... many strange events to happen which purposely are omitted in good consideration.' With their fellow printers in Amsterdam working round the clock to meet the public's demand for gruesome predictions it seems odd the English press were grown so coy, particularly when the editor of Holinshed's Chronicles had written the year before that Regiomontanus' prophecy was 'rife in every man's mouth'. But it was not in the Government's interest that England should be flooded with stories of death and destruction, for it was all too likely that any day now it would be visited by the real thing.

For some four years now England and Spain had been at war: an undeclared phoney war, fought at third hand, on the battlefields of the Low Countries and up and down the Spanish Main, by mercenaries and privateers, most notably the 'merry, careful' Francis Drake. Drake's raid on the port of Cadiz in April 1587 had cost Spain some thirty ships and had bought England a twelvemonth reprieve. But all this did was to postpone the inevitable until the fateful year 1588, because the Spanish were coming, with the mightiest fleet that had ever been amassed. Sixty-five galleons like floating castles, many-oared galleys, cargo-carrying urcas, nimble pataches and zabras, all these had been assembling in the west-coast ports of the Iberian peninsula since 1586. Together they could hold some thirty thousand men, numerous cavalry horses and pack animals and all the many carefully counted barrels of food and water needed to sustain a force of such size ...

Continues...

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Excerpted from God's Secret Agents by Alice Hogge Copyright © 2005 by Alice Hogge. Excerpted by permission.
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What People are Saying About This

Eamon Duffy

“Alice Hogge’s vivid narrative culminates in a gripping account of the [Gunpowder] Plot and its disastrous denouement.”

Editorial Reviews

One day in 1603, five devout British Catholics met secretly and swore an oath on the Holy Sacrament to blow up King James and the Houses of Parliament. This desperate act was designed to lift the rampant repression and persecution of Catholics within the country. On the night before the plot was to be enacted, conspirator Guy Fawkes was arrested in the cellars beneath Parliament with gunpowder. Alice Hogge's God's Secret Agents describes how warring religious fundamentalists nearly changed the face of England.

As historian Hogge points out in this sometimes dry and sometimes lively popular religious history, the impulse to return Catholicism to England in the latter part of the 16th century arose with the establishment of the Anglican Church. In the early days of her reign, Elizabeth instituted strict laws regarding church attendance and religious practice with punishments that included fines and death. By the time that James I ascended to the throne, persecution of Catholics had risen to such a pitch that a group of Catholic conspirators, including most famously Guy Fawkes, hatched a plot to blow up Parliament. Hogge provides a tantalizing glimpse into the lives of the priests-such as Edmund Campion, John Gerard and Henry Garnet-who made martyrs of themselves in their efforts to reinstate Catholicism in England. Hogge deftly narrates the seething world of religious conflict in late 16th- and early 17th-century England, as well as the intra-Catholic conflicts that arose in the face of persecutions by the throne. Anyone interested in vibrant details of the Gunpowder Plot will have to look elsewhere, since the event plays a small role in Hogge's book, but for a detailed sketch of the religious conflict that led to the plot, Hogge's book provides a starting point. (June) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Hogge’s absorbing narrative of the experience of [Catholic] underground life reads like a historical novel.” — The Guardian

“Hogge deftly narrates the seething world of religious conflict in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England.” — Publishers Weekly

“An illuminating look at an often overlooked period of church-state turmoil . . . Draws surprising parallels with events today.” — National Catholic Reporter

“An exciting account of the Catholic resistance in England under Elizabeth.” — New Statesman

“Compelling storytelling.” — The Observer

“Alice Hogge’s vivid narrative culminates in a gripping account of the [Gunpowder] Plot and its disastrous denouement.” — Eamon Duffy, New York Review of Books

“A well-researched, skillfully crafted book that evokes the physical as well as the intellectual world of Renaissance English Catholicism.” — Weekly Standard

“A tense, taut, real-life political thriller.” — Booklist

“[A] vivid and moving portrait of the Counterreformation in the Elizabethan age.” — The Spectator

“Paints a vivid picture of the stresses of operating in secret, under false identities, in constant fear of betrayal.” — London Times

“The final chapters make moving, even tragic reading.” — Evening Standard

“Excellently researched and beautifully written.” — Financial Times

From the Publisher

An illuminating look at an often overlooked period of church-state turmoil . . . Draws surprising parallels with events today.

National Catholic Reporter

A well-researched, skillfully crafted book that evokes the physical as well as the intellectual world of Renaissance English Catholicism.

Weekly Standard

Hogge’s absorbing narrative of the experience of [Catholic] underground life reads like a historical novel.

The Guardian

Paints a vivid picture of the stresses of operating in secret, under false identities, in constant fear of betrayal.

London Times

The final chapters make moving, even tragic reading.

Evening Standard

[A] vivid and moving portrait of the Counterreformation in the Elizabethan age.

The Spectator

Excellently researched and beautifully written.

Financial Times

Alice Hogge’s vivid narrative culminates in a gripping account of the [Gunpowder] Plot and its disastrous denouement.

Eamon Duffy

A tense, taut, real-life political thriller.

Booklist

Compelling storytelling.

The Observer

An exciting account of the Catholic resistance in England under Elizabeth.

New Statesman

Paints a vivid picture of the stresses of operating in secret, under false identities, in constant fear of betrayal.

London Times

[A] vivid and moving portrait of the Counterreformation in the Elizabethan age.

Jonathan Mirsky