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

22:15Dominic Sandbrook:Exactly. Especially, well, if you're under threat yourself, right?

22:18Tom Holland:Yeah, completely. And someone else who was there with him was 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's 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, if we give them the chance, they will do the same in London.

22:56Dominic Sandbrook:That appealed to wake up. We've been asleep. We must have wake out of our dead sleep. I mean, that's so common in history.

23:02Tom Holland:Wake up sheeple.

23:03Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah, exactly. So not long after the massacre, Walsingham comes back to London, doesn't he, from his ambassadorial posting. And we've 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 yeah definitely than when he went and then lord birdley gives him a new job and a very

23:43Tom Holland:an absolutely crucial new job well basically burley gives him his old job so lord burley had been um 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 spy master and as the queen 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 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 um there's been kind of legislative beefing up since the Pope's excommunication of Elizabeth.

24:43Tom Holland: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 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 Mullally, 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.

25:39Tom Holland:So people who recusere, 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.

25:49Dominic Sandbrook:Just a question. Elizabeth has been queen now for quite a while. 12, 13 years, right? Yeah. 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.

26:04Tom Holland:but she's been there a long time she's been there longer than mary was queen because um 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 um so anne boleyn is seen as a whore and so she is called the great whore and elizabeth is called the little whore

26:28Dominic Sandbrook:of course i'm just surprised that it's now quite a long day people don't live that long in the 16th century. It's quite a long time since Anne Boleyn was around. 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.

26:47Tom Holland: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. Both sides serve to radicalise the other. How are they exposed to Catholic propaganda?

27:04Dominic Sandbrook:Because surely the government is straining every sinew to make sure that Catholic propaganda is not distributed.

27:10Tom Holland:We are going to be coming to that because the elision between Catholicism and treason, which those laws are pretty explicitly making, is something that increasingly by the 1570s is starting to animate people like Walsingham. They feel that 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 succour 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 your burley again they are becoming more and more nervous of english catholics and seeing them as 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 spain and of france and so therefore walsingham's duties as chief intelligence 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 Burleigh's intelligence networks, these were not institutional in the way that, say, the intelligence networks of Venice were.

29:06Tom Holland: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 we compared England to Iran in the 21st century in our previous episode. England is very isolated and also relatively poor, doesn't have the reach and the scope, say, of the agents employed by Philip II. Philip rules this 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.

29:47Tom Holland:The Queen is stingy. 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 brother-in-law, his kind of secretary, he's become secretary to the Privy Council on his return from Paris. He notes Walsingham's financial as well as ideological commitment to the cause with great admiration. 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 the in the very 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 um but the hardest nuts to crack are the most menacing and one of these is spain the most formidable power the english The English intelligence services find it difficult to plant agents in Phillips court.

30:49Tom Holland:And the other, of course, is the papacy, which is an institution with which England obviously has no diplomatic relations at all. And so Wolsingham 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. 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 burley who you know generally i mean loves the 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 a 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.

31:45Tom Holland:He is closer to the reports of his agents now than Burley is. And he is abreast of very alarming news 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, 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 Marlowe 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.

32:29Tom Holland:The cup whence poison 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 to English soil. And these enemies, Dominic, are enemies whose very name is sufficient to chill the soul of any devout Protestant.

33:24These enemies are the Jesuits.

33:27Dominic Sandbrook:Oh no, well, 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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37:26Dominic Sandbrook: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 Goalhanger, Tony Pastor, he is a man of Lancashire. So a man of Lancashire, educated at Oxford.

38:12Dominic Sandbrook:So he's very like Tony Pasta. Well, in some ways. 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.

38:21Tom Holland:He's got a mole, hasn't he? 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 Oriel College. So a 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.

38:58Tom Holland: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 asking, how are people in England being kept abreast of all these developments? It's these priests who are being 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 succor 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, 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, in Cambridge or the civil service or whatever.

39:51Tom Holland: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 year. So by 1579, Alan 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 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 alan 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 um in mid-september 1579 alan gives his fellow guests the great news you know the pope is on board um he's given us more funding uh an invasion force with spanish soldiers has landed in Ireland.

41:26Tom Holland:It's all great. It's all kicking off. Things are really, really looking up. And Stephen Alford wrote a brilliant book about the espionage war called The Watchers.

41:36Dominic Sandbrook:The Watchers, great book.

41:37Tom Holland: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 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.

42:15Tom Holland:And like you, Dominic, He is a Balian man. And like you, he is bold, formidable and charismatic. Oh, thanks. Unlike you, however. Yeah, he's a priest. 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.

42:38Dominic Sandbrook:Right. So tell us a little bit about the Jesuits because they are about 40 years old at this point, aren't they?

42:44Tom Holland:They're a religious order.

42:45Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah. Yeah. Poverty, chastity, obedience. But what marks them out is this kind of fanatical loyalty to the Pope, right? Fanatical devotion to the Pope, I believe. Right. Monty Python would put it.

42:58Tom Holland: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 traveled 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. 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.

43:39Tom Holland: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 magic mix. But Persons is very, very determined. And so he has joined forces with Alan and the pair of them have been pushing for this kind of great mission to England. And Alan is very keen. He welcomes Persons with open arms because he kind of admires them as the spiritual elite of the counter-reformation, the kind of the very sharpest edge.

44:21Tom Holland: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 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.

45:15Tom Holland:They leave Rome on the 25th of February, 1580. So it is all kicking off.

45:22Dominic Sandbrook: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 um was once an apprentice to a merchant he had been in rome since the previous summer he had gone tost 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

45:59Tom Holland: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.

46:41Tom Holland:And Allen 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 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 Alan. And then shortly after that, he pops up in Rouen, which is one of the main centers of English Catholic exiles in France.

47:23Tom Holland:And everywhere he goes, he's carrying letters from Alan, and then he's taking letters back to Alan and the fellow conspirators. And he is attending their meetings. 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 Carré will come as no surprise whatsoever, because on the afternoon of 17th of May, he pops up in London at the court in Westminster.

48:15Tom Holland:And at the court in Westminster, Charles Sled, if that was indeed his name, is ushered into the presence of Francis Walsingham.

48:27Dominic Sandbrook:I mean, listeners must have heard this coming when they heard you talking about his eye for detail and he's a brilliant master 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.

49:00Tom Holland:Yeah, so it's details of the pensions they're getting from the Pope and also very, very vivid physical descriptions. And Stephen Orford in The Watchers, which is absolutely, 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.

49:24Dominic Sandbrook:Sort of WikiLeaks type thing.

49:26Tom Holland: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 enumerary 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 england is at war and that the priests that Alan is sending to England might protest that they are they're not political agents you know 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 arrant traitors.

50:39Tom Holland: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. And so this is why Elizabeth is not burning Catholics in the way that her sister had done. She's learned 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.

51:16Dominic Sandbrook:So for Wollsingham now, it's a manhunt, right, to track down these conspirators?

51:21Tom Holland:Yeah, because he loves hunting. 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 it's a manhunt and he's got two people in particular that he's

51:35Dominic Sandbrook:after so one of them is the baliol man you already mentioned robert persons and the other is robert persons his deputy who is a londoner called edmund campion who ends up becoming a great hero doesn't

51:45Tom Holland:he to catholics 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 um he had formally welcomed elizabeth to the university and elizabeth had been very impressed with him so too had william sesal who will become lord burley and had kind of adopted him as a protege but campion starts to have doubts um 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 in england at this point and he starts to 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.

52:55Tom Holland: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 that this was provocative to send the Jesuits into England. But he's taken his vow of obedience, so he has to go, and so off he sets. And you might think that if they're going undercover into England, that Persons and Campion would, as 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.

53:34Tom Holland:They're massive celebrities, and their mission is seen by Catholics as something heroic and thrilling. And so despite themselves, they are are celebrities even before they have arrived in England. Reckless. It is reckless, but maybe also a kind of challenge to the Protestant establishment that we are coming as priests. And neither Walsingham nor Burleigh have any doubt as to particularly Campion's capabilities. You know, 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.

54:22Tom Holland:So he is very, he convinces people without seeming kind of swivel eyed.

54:28Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's a true believer, but he's not mad, which is an important distinction.

54:32Tom Holland:You're not going to recoil from him in the street. Yeah. So all these qualities, of course, just make him seem more dangerous 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.

55:09Tom Holland:And so to quote Jesse Childs in her wonderful prize-winning book, God's Traitors, which is all about the recusants in Elizabethan England, 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 Burleigh say, no, this is subversion.

55:32Dominic Sandbrook:But they would be right to say that, wouldn't they? I mean, conversion and subversion are the same thing.

55:37Tom Holland:If you are a Protestant minister of Queen Elizabeth, indisputably.

55:42Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah.

55:43Tom Holland:If you are a Catholic priest, I think you could say, well, I'm doing God's will. But it's a fine distinction because the Pope has excommunicated the Queen. I mean, that's surely the killer detail. You are not wrong.

55:55Dominic Sandbrook:And Campion keeps very quiet about this. Because you cannot possibly say, oh, well, this is politically neutral.

56:03Tom Holland:Dominic, you absolutely can. And they do.

56:05Dominic Sandbrook:They do say that, but people don't believe them.

56:07Tom Holland: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 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.

56:52Tom Holland:He's got a leather coat that's trimmed with gold braid. He's got a feather in his cap, massively fanboyant. I think he's just a natural ham.

57:00Dominic Sandbrook:It's a good disguise, though.

57:02Tom Holland:Yeah, it's a really good disguise because, you know, he's described 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 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 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.

57:38Tom Holland:So he manages to carry on from Dover. And he arrives in London, where he rendezvous with persons. 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, 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.

58:30Tom Holland: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.

59:11Tom Holland:It seems a really terrifying provocation. And you can see why. 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

59:42Dominic Sandbrook:brag 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 ideological arrogance to it you know we're we're jesuit yeah but but ideological arrogance is the whole point of

59:59Tom Holland:being, I suppose, a kind of part of a religious shock force. But I'm surprised that they're so provoked by it. 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, 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 they can read between the lines.

1:00:45Tom Holland:They know what he's getting at.

1:00:46Dominic Sandbrook:And you compared him with the Cambridge traitors. I mean, 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.

1:01:02Tom Holland:I mean, Kim Philby is an evil man who portrayed 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. But he has a similar grip on the imagination that somebody like Philby had. I mean, if you're saying he's very charismatic, then yes. But he becomes a hero to Catholics because they see him, which I think he is, as a principled and heroic man who is touring. He leaves London. He tours Berkshire, Oxfordshire, Northamptonshire, so kind of the countryside. He's preaching in barns and he's attracting ever swelling congregations.

1:01:42Tom Holland:congregations. He has a touch of the stardust. People want to come and hear him. And undoubtedly, he is getting converts 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. But for months and months, he's not caught and the whole Protestant spy agency are looking out for him. So that also adds to his kind of glamour, I think, the sense of him 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 almost a year.

1:02:23Tom Holland: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 requisite house called Lifford Grange in Berkshire.

1:03:08Tom Holland:And actually, the people 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 hole with these two other priests. And the guy who has led them there is a very sinister figure called George Eliot. So he's the spy catcher. And he's a Catholic apostate who, 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. He's been really bigging up all the stuff about plots and things funded by the Pope, assassinations of Elizabeth.

1:03:45Tom Holland:I think coming up with material that wasn't actually true. And he very shrewdly tells Burley and Walsingham 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 hole, you know, he is not treated well, which is what you would expect. So 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 E's, which is a joke, because you can neither stretch nor rise to your feet.

1:04:26Tom Holland: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 people may be wondering, well, 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 Burley in 1575, without torture, I know we shall not prevail.

1:04:55Dominic Sandbrook:Golly, very war on terror.

1:04:57Tom Holland:Kind of Dick Cheney, isn't it? What was 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, 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 wracked with torments or to be consumed with your prisons you know we will keep coming and he was right to dread what the uh 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 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 And he's not being tortured, he's being subjected to various inquiries.

1:05:53Tom Holland: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 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. Yeah. is his mission a pastoral one or is it blatant 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.

1:06:34Tom Holland: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 the third 220 years before so he is convicted as a traitor yeah and on the first 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.

1:07:25Tom Holland:And then when he's dead, his body is quartered and the various quarters are dispatched to gateways around London. And Walsingham and Burley and the Privy 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 Smurwick 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.

1:08:15Tom Holland:And of course, Persons is still on the scene, but he manages to slip away. And the 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.

1:09:03Tom Holland:So for Walsingham's men, they are stopping the proselytization of potential Catholics. It's destroying a foreign-funded campaigner subversion. 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, 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.

1:09:52Tom Holland: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.

1:10:05Dominic Sandbrook: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 holes and double agents, is it? It's also a story of swashbuckling sea dogs. It is. 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 a controversial figure these days, and that is Sir Francis Drake.

1:10:49Dominic Sandbrook: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 as we speak you may have not even be 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 the rest is history.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 the rest is history.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

1:11:40Tom Holland:and more 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 a letter to Queen Victoria and she neglected to reply and he got in a massive strop and chaos ensued yeah it's

1:11:59Dominic Sandbrook: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 it's very Flashman isn't it there's a Flashman book about it Flashman on the March yeah it's it's the ideal Flashman story if

1:12:15Tom Holland: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 therestishistory.com and buy everything it's got to offer

1:12:32Dominic Sandbrook:so on that bombshell we'll be back next time with Sir Francis Drake goodbye bye