Customer Reviews

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

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"Remember Remember the Fifth of November

The Gunpowder Treason and Plot

I'll tell you a reason why Jesuit Treason

Should never be forgot

"If there hadn't been given protection from Heaven

To the Parliament Houses and Throne

When the Pope to the flames had devoted King James

They had all to destruction been blown

"Then ever let England her gratitude show

To the Power that averted that terrible blow,

In thanksgiving to God our voices we'll raise

To Him be the glory, to Him be the praise.

"And thus was remembered the fifth of November

The Jesuit Treason and Plot

For should Popery reign we may have it again,

So let Protestants say, IT SHALL NOT!!

"Shout boys shout! let the ring bells ring--

Down with the Jesuits and

GOD SAVE THE KING"

Ah, but were the Jesuits really involved (as this English ditty sung for Guy Fawkes Day celebrations assumes) in the 1605 Gunpowder Plot to blow away (literally) the Anglican government of England and restore Roman Catholicism as the true religion of the land? In GOD'S SECRET AGENTS, Alice Hogge sets forth a fascinating case that the plot by dissident Catholics, which was real enough, also provided the Anglican Protestant government with a marvelously effective propaganda tool with which to suppress English Catholicism in general and the Jesuit order in particular.

Queen Elizabeth had, despite occasional protestations to the contrary, shown herself generally willing to suppress those of her subjects who professed to follow the Catholic faith, except when her government viewed them as "cash cows," fining them severely for failure to attend State-approved church services. As for priests who ministered to practicing Catholics, arrest, hanging, disemboweling, and drawing and quartering lay just behind discovery by the government priest-hunters, the pursuivants.

In due course, Elizabeth dies and is succeeded by James, the Scottish king. Professing tolerance and seeking peace among his subjects, James nonetheless proves himself to be far more interested in reconciling the various Protestant factions than in extending the hand of tolerance to the papists in his kingdom. (The King James Version of the Bible is unabashedly a Protestant translation.) In their disappointment at James' failed assurances, several extremists stockpile gunpowder in a cellar under the House of Lords and are discovered only at the eleventh hour, leading, of course, to more hangings, disemboweling, etc.

This, in a nutshell, is the history covered by Hogge's book, but this summation scarcely hints at the incredibly fascinating journey through the telling of that history: Plot and counter-plot. Stealth. Intrigue. Secret landings on the coast at night. Disguises. Government spies. Deceit. Concealed hiding places ("priest holes") artfully constructed in the walls, staircases and chimneys of houses. Thundering blows at the door in the middle of the night as the pursuivants close in. State-sponsored (and therefore legal) torture of suspected priests and their servants. This history book is as much a "page turner" as any spy novel but with the added benefit of imparting factual knowledge to the reader.

Anyone interested in the culture and society of England in the decades leading up to and encompassing the creation of the King James Version of the Bible, which remains incredibly popular to this day, will be delighted by Hogge's book, although a measure of horror and disgust may attend some of her descriptions of the government's justice meted out to loyal citizens who had the misfortune of adhering to the "wrong" faith. The reader who marries Hogge's GOD'S SECRET AGENTS to Allister McGrath's IN THE BEGINNING will beget an excellent picture of the forces that created contemporary English and American society, particularly as those societies are shaped (or warped) by religious movements.

GOD'S SECRET AGENTS is Alice Hogge's first book. In interest, readability, and historical worth, it easily outshines books by far more published authors. May this be but the first of many excellent histories from this amazing writer!

Hogge is a terrific writer, and she tackles a subject that makes for edge-of-your-seat reading.

This is the story of Elizabethan England's dark side. Even as Shakespeare created some of the world's greatest literature, a vast number of Englishmen lived in terror.

Catholicism was outlawed. Catholic books weere banned and burned, Catholic citizens first fined, and later killed for daring to attend a mass. The fear of the times is palpable. Any servant, either out of spite or greed, could turn you in.

A small and secret army of priests tended to recrusant Catholics. Priests, who, even if they had been born and educated in England, loved England, were branded the worst of felons and traitors. Many, if not most, would end up sent to grisly deaths, tortured for days before being hung and disembowled. All for believing in a religion that had once been taught throughout the land.

Nothing could save you. Not money or connections. Elizabeth I, with all her glittering entourage, once watched Edmund Campion defeat all comers at an Oxford debate. She was dazzled. The brilliant Campion, deemed "one of the diamonds of England" (P 67) had a secure future. He threw it away to become a priest. Even then, he could have lived in safety in France. He chose to come back and serve God in England, knowing it would end in his death. Andit did, a cruel and prolonged death.

The priests like Campion, mostly Jesuits, lived a precarious existence. Escher-like mazes and priest holes were built to hide them. But there was always a friend or servant who could be tempted to turn you in.

Richard Topcliff, Elizabeth's chief priest hunter, swaggers through the book, a portrait of utter venality and indifference to suffering. He imprisoned Anne Bellamy and raped her, leaving her pregnant (p 178). He devised ever more vile methods of torture. He died at age 73, living in a manor he had extorted from one of his victims.

It was a raw age, and a cruel one. The cruelty is embodied in the sad figure of Margaret Ward, who, crippled and half paralysed by torture, had to stagger clumsily to her gallows (p 96). Or in Margaret Clitherow, a young mother who was ordered pressed to death over three days. Without food or water she died by inches (p 210.) Yet most refused to recant.

Any book on Elizabethan poets includes some by Robert Southwell. What few know is the fascinating story of his life.

Southwell was born into one of the most famous and wealthiest families in England. He ended up becoming the Scarlet Pimpernell of his era. He dashed off poems and epistles as government spies sought him here, they sought him there, they sought him almost everywhere. He knew what was coming. "Rue not my death" he wrote in one of this poems. Even after Richard Topcliffe captured him he remained the perfect gentleman and Christian. He forgave the men who tortured and condemned him. He was so popular that at his execution the crowd insisted that he be allowed to die by hanging rather than by disembowlment.

Anyone interested in this book will also want to read E. Duffy's "The Stripping of the Altars" which deals with English reaction to the dissolution of the monasteries. The book, written by an atheist, caused a sensation in England when it was published. It overturned the idea that people welcomed the Anglican relgion. An eye-opener of a book.

You know the ship is going to sink, yet the story is still riveting. You know the Catholic mission in England is doomed to failure, yet this was an equally riveting book.

I must confess I was expecting a wholly different book. As a Catholic who is regularly irked by how frequently the Catholic Church is slandered in the mainstream media, I was actually hoping for a book that would turn the tables and portray the English Protestants as inhuman savages. Shame on me.

For my own edification, I am glad the book was far from that. The author did an astounding job of impartially covering the social, political and even theological complexities involving the Catholic-Protestant struggle in England during the sixteenth and and early seventeenth centuries. The author's evenhandedness is most evident in her treatment of Fr. John Garnet and his alleged role in the Gunpowder Plot. After reading this book, one can see that the evidence can be weighted equally towards his guilt or innocence. I personally can't decide.

Although she describes in detail the persecution of Catholics, she does so in a non-judgemental fashion and also makes clear that there were legitimate reasons to fear Catholics being a Fifth Column: the Northern Rebellion, the Ridolfi and Babington plots, and finally the Gunpowder Plot itself. One can only wonder how different history might have been if Pope Pius V had not issued the bull of deposition. Although subsequent Popes rescinded that bull and clearly instructed that Catholics were not to participate in acts of sedition, the damage to Catholic credibility was irreparable.

Having said that, by the time of the Northern Rebellion (which really was started by nobles for whom religion was unimportant but who were disgruntled over Elizabeth's gentry upstarts), England's Catholics had been repressed by Elizabeth for over 10 years. I think most readers will be shocked to find just how devastating were the tribulations suffered by English Catholics. You probably will not read about this anywhere else.

Finally, she concludes her book with a commentary about our present times and the lessons which we must learn from that tragic conflict. Every human being on Earth should read this final chapter.

Alice Hogge's book is about more than English policies against Catholics in sixteenth century England. Ultimately her book is about the doomed Catholics of England, their lives, their beliefs, their incredible courage and how they rankled the Protestant proto-totalitarians by their very existence.

Hogge's book also contains some fascinating photos of priest-holes (the hiding places of Catholic priests, many of which were ingeniously built by an Oxford carpenter named Nicholas Owen).

Just to read the barest of details about Henry Walpole's life after his conversion to his forefather's faith at the execution of St. Edmund Campion is worth the price of the book. Walpole as a largely disinterested Anglican when he stood in the mud of Tyburn fields to watch the execution of Jesuit Fr. Edmund Campion on Dec. 1, 1581. What was Campion's crime? He was Catholic. He had also horribly embarrassed Anglican divines by crushing them in theological debates even though he was denied the use of books, and had been tortured for months. When his entrails were cut from his abdomen and thrown into a boiling cauldron blood splattered onto the shirt of Henry Walpole. Instantly he was converted. He knew he could not remain a Protestant. He left England to become a Jesuit priest. He returned to be martyred. His brother, Michael, and his cousin, Edward, also became Jesuits (or at least priests).

Through the time of the Tudors and the Stuarts, England was in turmoil. While there were ethnic, econmic, and military pressures to be sure, one of the principle concerns of people high born and low was religion - this was the age of Reformation on the Continent, carried over to England by Henry VIII and various churchmen, resisted by his daughter Mary and other churchmen, reinstituted by his other daughter Elizabeth, and established more firmly by the coming of the Stuarts, who, while of Catholic background and sensibility, nonetheless recognised the political reality.

If this seems convoluted and confusing, the reader can be forgiven, for such was the case. And this is but the barest outline. Into this highly contentious realm, author Alice Hogge has placed some order and explanation, making things more clear, within the limits of reason. This was a time when Catholics became Protestants and back again, where churchmen and laypersons swayed with the politico/religious winds (and those who stood firm sometimes were snapped by the winds). Part of the confusion was the deliberate attempt at this by what might qualify as the first concerted effort of spying, intelligence and counter-intelligence operations of the modern world. Sir Francis Walsingham, a key figure in Elizabeth's court and a primary character in Hogge's text, perhaps qualifies as the first spy-master in history, controlling networks of agents at home and abroad.

Walsingham had need of this network, for his foes were many indeed. As the Protestant hold on Enlgand over time seemed more and more secure (it was a multi-generational shift), there were Catholics in exile on the Continent being supported by Rome with the intention of one day recapturing England for the Roman world. Priests were trained in Roman seminaries with the purpose of returning again as illicit missionaries. Sometimes they involved themselves in political intrigues, and other times suffered the fate of spies even when their actions were wholly religious in nature. Entire networks existed that included carpenters and craftsmen, public and court officials on local, regional and national levels, clergypersons and nobles, all committed to keeping the cause of Catholic resurgence a possibility.

Perhaps the greatest expressions of this fervour include the assassination attempts against Queen Elizabeth, and the famous Gunpowder Plot, an attempt to blow up the Parliament building during the State Opening, in which the king - James by this time - would be present with virtually the entire House of Lords and House of Commons. (It is a testimony to this event that Tower of London guards still troop through the Palace of Westminster in anticipation of the State Opening each year.)

Hogge's narrative is done in a popular and interesting style. It is not too heavily annotated, with reference notes positioned as endnotes, and explanatory notes as footnotes (but there aren't too many of those, Hogge preferring to incorporate such things into the text itself). There is a good bibliography and a useful index. There are dozens of ilustrations on photo plates in two sections in the book, which include images of key people, as well as photographs of documents and other relevant things. A few things I missed were having a timeline of events outlined in the text, and a chart of the people - sort of a cast list for the play, with brief explanations to help keep the names straight.

This book serves as an interesting glimpse into Elizabethan England, one apart from the Shakespearean playhouses, and a bit beyond the usual royal history books, too. This is a good text, made all the more remarkable that it is the debut of Alice Hogge. I look forward to her future work.

Alice Hogge has written, in her first book, a masterpiece of history, not only in the modern familiar sense of a brilliant artifact but also in the original sense of a "work by which a craftsman achieves the rank of a master". (from Online Etymology)

The earlier reviewers in this space have done such a fine job of recapitulating the book's main themes and events that any specific comments of mine would seem to be superfluous. I would, however, like to offer a few general observations in support of my enthusiasm.

God's Secret Agents is an examination of the clash between political necessity and religious belief in Elizabethan England. No - that sounds too dry and dutiful for such a fun and suspenseful read, a marvelous recreation of a momentous period. Ms. Hogge's prose is beautiful, her narrative flowing, and her analysis incisive. She is scrupulously faithful to the sources and spirit of the time, and yet manages to illuminate the concerns of our present. Her book is a two way mirror on the past.

Philip Roth once said that "the terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides." It is a tribute to the quality of Alice Hogge's historical imagination that her rendering of the facts has enabled the reader to appreciate the significance of events while experiencing a bit of their original terror.

A well-written, if occasionally dry, account of religious terrorism in the 16th century.

This is the story of the battle to try to return England to the Catholic Church. A battle being fought by stealth and by argument by Jesuit priests, where the might of Spain (the Spanish Armada) had failed.

Many of the priests, and the English Catholics who gave them refuge, demonstrated incredible courage in a battle over faith that - from this distance - was always doomed to fail.

Their mission was ultimately shattered by the actions of the Gunpowder Plotters.

While the book is about the religious battle, it is equally about the building of a nation.

Highly recommended to those who want more knowledge about the development of the English Church, as well as to those interested in exploring the links between politics and religion.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

It seems that, for a lot of its history, the Society of Jesus was used as a convenient whipping boy by governments. The Jesuits were accused of many awful things, probably the most serious being complicity in the Gunpowder Plot in 1606 England. This extremely well-written book gives the history of the Jesuit mission in England during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I, and shows that these brave men were merely trying to keep the flickering flame of Catholicism alive in Anglican England. For this they were branded traitors, hunted down like dogs, and murdered in the most horrible manner possible. The Gunpowder Plot may have been known to some of them, but they took no part in it, and rightfully realized that it would only harden government action against them. This is a book well worth reading to see how far we have come (or have we?), in disagreements about religious doctrine.

This book does not offer any stunning new insights or suggestive research, but that is not it's purpose. Here we find a well-told tale of intrigue and religious history that goes far in helping to explain a convoluted and complex time. Much of he author's research is sound, but not new. Hogge's strength is her ability to involve us in events so far removed from our lives that--in the hands of a lesser writer--we would expect to be bored. Instead, we are involved from the first, and despite a slow chapter here and there, cannot resist finding out more of a period in history that teaches much about today's civil/religious disputes. Read this book with hot coffee and a quirky smile of quiet joy.

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.