Customer Reviews

God's Secret Agents

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Much written history is well documented, but dry reading indeed. Hogge's work is well researched, but flows as well as a historical novel, despite the fact that it is pure history. I picked up this book, intending only to browse through it (because of my interest in the Gunpowder Plot) but wound up reading the entire thing, because it is such a good read. Many historians know their material well, but that doesn't mean that they can write . . . . Hogge is not only an accomplished historian, she is an excellent writer as well. I learned a great deal about the religious divides of the period, as well as the fact that the Gunpowder Plot was not an isolated incident, but the outgrowth of more than 40 years of religious conflict in England. If you have any interest in Elizabethan/Jacobean history, this is a "must read."

Alice Hogge was unknown to me. The title was interesting so I gave it a read. This is a stunning work of close historical detail with numerous, fascinating presentations of sources. Detail, detail, detail. Actual words. Specific references to exact addresses and places, how formalities were performed. The uderlying savagery is presented in a fair context of the time. The reference to Moslems is but a small part of the wrap-up of the book, the slightest reference in a section of the author's musing. The rolling presentation is unique. Ponderous - not at all. Boring - never. The age, the policitcs, the personalities all come alive by their own words. This is a stunning work for students of Shakespeare, Religion, the irrationality of formality, and of documented historical technique. It is a study in the extremes of courage, paranoia, and statecraft. It is not for children because it discusses physical realities that must be understood to understand the choices people faced and made. We live in history all our lives, the effects often hidden. Great work by a very, very disciplined writer. A gem.

Here is a wonderful book - full of scholarship and well-written, often as gripping as a spy novel, and packed with information to help us appreciate the long and painful journey we have made to reach relatively free and tolerant societies in the advanced world.

The Elizabethan era has long been one of my favorites - a time of great change, a notable step towards the modern era, a time packed with high adventures and important achievements, a time of great writers and adventurers, and the time of one of Europe's greatest princes (Elizabeth herself used the term prince), and I have read a good many books. So it was pleasantly surprising that Alice Hogge offered a number of details and anecdotes of which I had little or no knowledge.

Elizabeth's special deputy, as it were, in hunting down Catholic priests in hiding and recusants (Catholics who refused to join the Church of England, despite fines and punishments) assisting them, Richard Topcliffe, was an extraordinarily hideous figure. I had read references to him before, but here are some facts and events of which I was unaware.

Elizabeth herself is known to have been a tolerant in people's dissenting religious beliefs, so long as they were kept private and a public show was made of keeping to the laws governing England's new church arrangements. Everything religious in that time was unfortunately also charged with political meaning, and if ever there were a lesson for keeping church and state separate, this tale is it.

The Parliament of that day was increasingly under the influence of the Puritans, and Elizabeth had to make compromises with them despite not agreeing with their nasty excesses, a story both of the dawning of a new religious era and the decline in the power of the monarch as part of the long journey towards democratic government.

Still, the details offered of Topcliffe's special relationship with Elizabeth are surprisingly unpleasant to learn.

But it was a terrible time - one we can barely fully appreciate - especially after Elizabeth's excommunication in 1570 by Pius V giving Catholics the "right" to get rid of her, Philip II's 1588 massive Armada and other efforts to overthrow her, assassinations and civil wars in Europe, various plots in England, and Elizabeth's own great insecurity over her throne, considering all that came before her with her tyrant father and her terrifying half-sister Mary, and then that rather demented but charming contemporary claimant to the throne, Mary, Queen of Scots, always involved in plots.

The story of Nicholas Owen, craftsmen and builder of many ingeniously-conceived "priest hides" in English Catholic great homes, is a wonderful one. I was pleased that the author gave a substantial discussion of his admirable and heroic efforts.

The terrible irony of those times was that so many good people on both sides - Catholic and non-Catholic - were swept away in a great tide of terrible events brought on by a smaller number of fanatics and paranoids. Ms. Hogge gives us a very vivid sense of this. She also gives us a good sense of the terrible extremism - just as bad as the worst Catholic plotters - of the emerging extreme Protestants, the various Puritan groups who were as ugly and murderous as the bloodiest Popes.

The story continues after Elizabeth - she died in 1603 - with the first of the Stuart kings, James I , a king who started with much promise and delivered little in religious and other matters, and on to the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, whose dark corners and ambiguities Ms Hogge outlines. Ms. Hogge takes us to the end for some of the key characters of the era, but of course the end of her book was not the end of religious strife. It is a tale of executions, torture, and exile.

I loved the way Ms. Hogge gave us an afterward relating the hunt for Catholics in England then to the situation of Muslims today in Western countries.

This is altogether an admirable and excellent book, and I recommend it highly.

This is a detailed and thorough account, with care taken to inform the general reader of the specialist contexts and terminology used by historians as the narrative progresses. She tells of the early missionaries from the continent, often educated in colleges founded in Europe by English Catholic exiles and how they travelled the country and lived within the "underground" recusant community.

Hogge claims that one of the reasons for writing this book was to highlight the work of Nicholas Owen. And indeed finding out his intriguing work for the first time was one of its surprises. Owen worked in the service of the Jesuit priest Henry Garnet, and was admitted into the Society of Jesus as a lay brother. Arrested early in 1606 after the Gunpowder Plot, he was submitted to terrible "examinations" on the rack until "his bowels gushed out with his life." However it is not this, terrible though it may be, that takes the readers interest. It is that Owen was the builder of many of the priest-holes found in the country's great houses and used to hide Catholic clergy when a house was searched. Helped no doubt by his small physical size, his work often involved breaking through thick stonework; and to minimize the likelihood of betrayal he often worked at night, and always alone. The number of hiding-places he constructed will never be known. Due to the ingenuity of his craftsmanship, some may still be undiscovered.

The main thrust of the book outlines the different and changing reaction of government to the recusant Catholics and those entering from abroad on missions. Initially tending to tolerance, this hardens, culminating in the post 1605 Oath of Allegiance and anti Roman Catholic legislation. The Apellant episode is also explored. Yet the Jesuits seem to have been opposed to regime change, the eventual Gunpowder Plot being the product of the frustration of home-grown subversives (assisted or not by government agents to increase the eventual anti-Catholic spin) at the lack of official change. Hogge paints a credible picture of the Jesuits as scapegoats for both James and Elizabeth's Government to blame their troubles on. There are two final sections of note. One indicates where Owen's building work may be seen today, the other draws the parallels (already emerging to the reader as the story unfolds) with present day British changes to torture and terrorist legislation and practice in response to current concerns over militant Islam.

However, this may be more a book to be dipped into (using the index - for some unexplained reason chapters are numbered like a novel but given no other description to assist partial reading for research) rather than read cover to cover. Perhaps tighter editing might have helped but I found the initial chapters and the final post 1600 section of most use and value (especially those outlining James I's early religious inclinations). During the 1580's and 1590's I tended to get lost amongst the places, names, conversations, letters and travels of those being described.

I have found this book incredibly informative and beautifully written. The complex tangle of Jesuit missionaries and shadey intelligencers requires a skilled narrative to keep from confusing the reader and Ms Hogge does this with a relaxed but authoritative style. I look forward to her next book.

"God's Secret Agents" is an interesting narrative covering Catholic priests in Elizabethan England. Alice Hogge draws an excellent portrait of a number of the leading Catholic figures in England during that period and provides a solid description of their lives, deaths and motivation. It's a complex story and to Hogge's credit she is able to provide a clear, if dry, narrative. Two caveats. Anyone looking for a rousing take on the Gunpowder Plot will have to look elsewhere. While the book provides a good background to the Fifth of November, the title is somewhat misleading. The other problem with the book is Hogge tries too hard to compare Catholics in England during the time of Elizabeth I and James I to Muslims in the West today especially with the specter of religiously motivated violence. It's tough to buy her line of thinking (Catholicism was more firmly established in England for centuries-see "The Stripping of the Altars" by Eamon Duffy-then Islam is in the modern West) and she tries too hard to make the comparison. Despite these problems, Hogge has provided a very clear and over all good if not especially gripping account of a complex and important subject.