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

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2:46slash mosquito to learn more 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

3:21head and hands and send them for a present to the pope and when this just revenge is finished and to mount focan 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 and then toll the bell and so let's forward to the massacre chilling so that was the sinister henry or henry duke of guise as ventriloquized by christopher

3:58marlowe 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 huguenots as they were called which began on the 24th of august 1572 saint bartholomew's day and marlowe was writing his play two decades later but the events of that day the bloodshed in

4:35the 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 that 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

5:05that they would not commit in the name of their hellish fanatical devotion to the bishop of rome and his underlings 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 yeah as we'll see marlowe is

5:37drawing on um contemporaneous accounts for his drama and even though um in the play the duke of guise is a kind of classic tudor dramatic machiavel kind of cackling and all of that the words in his speech do correspond as you said to 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

6:12distinguished soldier called gaspard de coligny and the reason that um the duke of guise is so triumphant as he stands over the corpse of coligny 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 colony is the leader of the huguenots the french protestants but as we also mentioned in our previous episode guise's hatred for colony is personal as well as sectarian because he blames the admiral for having

6:48sponsored 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 between the duke of guise and colony 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 the civil war in france between catholics and protestants and it's a wedding between a catholic

7:22and a protestant so the catholic is the sister of the french king charles the ninth charles the ninth 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 a colony the protestant has been invited as a particular guest of honor so there's this idea that you know catholics and protestants are going to be reconciled now guise who strongly disapproved of this wedding he has seized his chance for vengeance

7:57so first of all he sponsored this assassination attempt on colony and this was the shooting that had left colony as malay puts it shot through the arm and then two days later guise sends a death squad to attack colony 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 colony's quarters and they've been sent there by the king on charles the ninth's orders to protect colony against any threats from catholic intruders

8:28but 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 colony'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 colony's corpse down and worse is to follow and it's described by a huguenot lawyer called francois ottman and he writes colony remained exposed to all sorts of ignominy

8:59with some of his limbs cut off he was dragged through the mud and finally after three days was strung up by the feet at mont fausson 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 the this massacre was one of many that were translated into english and it was very very influential and you can tell how marlow drew on it very precisely for his play so that's

9:32the end of colony but meanwhile guise's men are hunting down colonies 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 have woken up all the protestant noblemen who are staying in the louvre as charles the ninth guests they have disarmed these protestant noblemen and then slaughtered them on mass and all the while as described in marlow's play so there's this kind of tolling of the bell the toxin of the

10:06church of saint germain is sounding and it's a signal for a wholesale massacre an uprising of catholics across paris against their protestant neighbors 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 neighbors so we're going to get right into the details of the massacre this is a classic sectarian mob violence but it's it's been masterminded right there are signals

10:39there are very powerful people who are controlling it and there's a sort of deliberate cold-bloodedness to it that there's been these there's 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 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

11:15massacres across france and as you say i mean it is undoubtedly fueled 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 allett 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 and so what that meant in effect was

11:49that protestant men were not just murdered they were castrated that pregnant women had their bellies slashed open and the fetuses pulled out and that children were targeted for wholesale butchery which was framed by protestants understandably as a new massacre of the innocent so when herod sent his soldiers to slaughter the innocents in bethlehem and one of the um the protestant narratives described how the seine was full of empty children's cradles from which the assassins had torn the newborn

12:24in order to steal their swaddling clothes before drowning them and there's another very notorious account written by a calvinist pastor who described seeing um 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 the small child to his death into the seine people may be saying well i mean god we've heard stories like this a thousand times

12:57and 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 well protestants 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

13:31and 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 school boys so it's a kind of emblem of order turned upside down there's a protestant bookseller who is burnt alive on a pyre

14:06fashioned 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

14:38are horrific and doesn't what's one of the things that adds to it the fact that they're 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 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

15:13sung 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 the second 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 says that your master charles the ninth 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

15:47in 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

16:20to protestants who were fleeing mobs and intriguingly and this really complicates the kind of the sense that we have from elizabethan propaganda about the guise this very powerful catholic family the duke of guise offered shelter to fugitive catholics and is this because basically it 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 then turned into something much bigger he'd lost control of it in a way i think also by offering

16:50protestant nobleman 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 i know the fact that guise 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

17:22massacre wasn't just a single massacre it was a whole kind of confluence of blood feuds and pogroms so guise's attack on colony and his followers had fused with charles the ninth's very opportunistic murder of the the protestant nobleman in his care and the news of these murders i think then had in turn inspired a kind of sectarian bloodlust right 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

17:55probably maybe there's a kind of rival bookseller who got rid of that you know the hugo bookseller or whatever they're the worst aren't they booksellers yeah catholic booksellers and this is what joanna arlette in her 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 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 those 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

18:28catholics are evil conspirators who are plotting to kill us all and guess what they've just done it in paris yeah i mean we know that if you see uh 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 the first chief minister who we were talking about in our

18:59previous episode and who at the end of that episode became lord burley so let's call him burley 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 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 guise

19:32like 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 stewart the queen of scots who is a prisoner in england and that the pope in particular has made

20:06his 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 but doesn't the massacre in paris suggest that actually the catholic plotters ambitions might go further that it's not

20:37just 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 yeah absolutely and he's bolstered in this view by um 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 burley um he's a very passionate protestant he's very subtle and

21:08implacable in his service to the queen he is a guy who is very skilled and practiced at interrogating catholic spies 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 signaling the onset of the massacre and he had used his house as a kind

21:40of 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 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

22:14as 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 have five thousand of your co-religionists slaughtered in the streets i mean that's something you're not going to get over easily exactly especially well if you're under threat yourself right 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

22:49and 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 less like mischief as has already overwhelmed the brethren and neighbors in france and flanders embrace us so in other words what catholics have done in paris yeah if we give them the chance they will do the same in london that appeal to wake up we've been asleep and mr wake out of our dead sleep i mean

23:20that's so common in history wake up sheeple yeah exactly so uh not long after the massacre walsingham comes back to london doesn't he from his ambassadorial posting and we've talked in the uh 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

23:54you know he is he has come back if anything more hawkish yeah definitely than when he went and then lord burleigh gives him a new job and a very an absolutely crucial new job well basically burleigh gives him his old job so lord burleigh 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

24:25in 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 um and as the queen's spy master 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

24:57of 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 criminalize 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

25:31against 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 um introduce the kind of laws i imagine i mean i doubt that sarah mulally 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 um under elizabeth against recusants they're called so people who recusere people who refuse to attend the services of the protestant church of england um they can be imprisoned without

26:06trial simply on the orders of the privy council 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 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

26:36her 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 of course i'm just surprised that it's now quite a long time 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 i don't think it's surprising at all because i think that

27:09the propaganda war on both sides is heating up um and that's always the way that when you have two ideologically opposed points of view yeah both sides serve to radicalize the other 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 we are going to be coming to that because um the elision between catholicism and treason which those laws are are pretty explicitly making

27:41is something that increasingly by the 1570s is starting to animate wolf people like walsingham 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 radicalized and that they are looking to the catholic powers

28:13beyond england for sucker 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

28:49you 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 of intelligence of 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 burley's intelligence networks

29:19these 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

29:54of the agents employed by philip the second you know philip is 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 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 um 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

30:29ideological 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 don't you know the

31:03english 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 bill 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

31:34nuncio 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

32:05he 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 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 marlowe shakespeare

32:40and 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 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 christendom in walsingham's opinion and this is administered by the most

33:11brilliant 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 these enemies are the jesuits oh no well we'll come

33:49back after the break and we will welcome to the rest of history some of the worst people who've ever lived the jesuits this episode is brought to you by lloyds now when you have ambitions being able to see the bigger picture is just so important and history definitely teaches us that my favorite example not necessarily a brilliant man but the spanish conquistador hernan cortez he was a visionary he was an adventurer but he also grasped that the empire of the aztecs was vulnerable and he took his men in land

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35:31months or $180 for 12 months plan required $15 per month equivalent taxes and fees extra initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy includes up to 20 gigabytes of hotspot capable device required availability speed and coverage varies see mintmobile.com welcome back to the rest is history it is september 1579 we are in the sump of sin we are in rome

36:08itself 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 honor at this dinner is a man who francis walsingham spymaster to elizabeth the first 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

36:38and like the co-founder of goal hanger tony pastor he is a man of lancashire so a man of lancashire educated at oxford so he's very like tony pastor but well in some ways listeners can tell straight away 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 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 he'd been a brilliant student at oxford then he'd been a fellow at oriel college so a great you know glittering academic career there

37:13but 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 rince in france so you were asking um you know how are people in england being

37:45kept abreast of of all these developments it's these 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 sucker 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 um to make conversions so i guess you know again pursuing the kind of cold war analogy um kgb agents in britain they were

38:17kind of there to establish links with pre-existing communists but also to recruit agents say 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 um priests sent by allen had arrived in england in 1574 and more had followed over the succeeding year so by 1579 allen has around a hundred priests kind of working undercover in england working to keep the

38:48flame of catholicism alive but now you know he's come to rome to hold this dinner because he wants to turbo charge 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

39:20diplomacy 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

39:57has landed in ireland um 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 that the espionage war called the watchers yeah the watchers great book he describes the speech that alan gave that 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 as six priests sign up to the

40:27mission 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 baliol man and like you he is bold formidable and charismatic unlike you however yeah he's a priest he's a priest he'd been ordained

41:01a 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 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 they're a religious order 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 is right the monty python would put

41:32it 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 who've seen shogun the priests in that are jesuits right 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

42:06conversions and this is my own native land england and so he has been pushing for this ever since he's become a jesuit so all the whole year since his um 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 magi mix but persons is very very determined and so he has joined forces with alan and the pair

42:42of 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 uh 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

43:17conspirators 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 shock force of undercover agents who will be crossing into england they leave rome uh on the 25th of

43:54february 1580 so it is all kicking off 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 to saint peter's for confession and then he'd begun working as a servant for an english

44:28catholic churchman in rome and how has he got involved how has he got involved with this party why is with them 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 uh and he's taking confession which demonstrates that he must be a catholic and so as an english catholic he's looking around for a job and he he gets his job with an english churchman in rome and that means that when this english churchman hosts dinners um charles sled is in attendance and

44:59william 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 and allen does spot him and realizes that he's kind of a very able i mean he's got all the qualities that you would want in a good servant and so when allen heads off with the um with the jesuits from rome bound for england sled goes with

45:31them and often is riding ahead of them to fix rooms and to take letters for allen and things like that so by the 6th of april before allen arrives in paris sled is already there and then soon afterwards he's in rince which is of course home of one of the two seminaries set up by by allen and then shortly after that he pops up in rouen which is one of the main centers of english catholic exiles in france and everywhere he goes he's carrying letters from allen and then he's taking letters back to allen

46:04and 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 mid may sled vanishes and people may be wondering where has he gone this trusted servant of william allen

46:37and 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 and at the court in westminster charles sled if that was indeed his name is ushered into the presence of francis walsingham i mean listeners must have heard this coming when they heard you talking about his eye for detail and he's yeah of course master recall and he can keep a secret and all of this kind of

47:12thing and effectively what he now does is he hands over to francis walsingham all the details all the inside though on um allen and 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 allen said we can rely we can contact these people and sled just gives all this to francis walsingham yeah so it's details of the pensions they're getting from the pope and also very very vivid physical descriptions and steven alford in the watchers which is absolute i mean it's such a brilliant book so gripping

47:46he 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 sort of wikileaks type thing yeah so robert beale um 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

48:19seas 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

48:52they'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 arrant 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

49:24so it's treason so he's going to be targeting them not for their religious beliefs but as traitors right 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 so for walsingham now it's a manhunt right to track

49:55down these conspirators 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 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 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 he to catholics yes so he's a very very impressive man i mean almost everything about him is impressive

50:26so 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 cecil 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

51:03catholic there than it is um yeah 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 um he ends up in dowie which is one of william allen's two seminaries and in 1571 he's formally uh 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

51:38with 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 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 clamor because everyone knows they're coming

52:09they'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 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 burley have any doubt as to particularly campion's capabilities you know he's said he's intellectually brilliant he has this amazing personal magnetism he's a very warm

52:44charming man everybody thinks this and also this incredible sense of conviction 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 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 yeah so all these qualities of course just make him seem more dangerous to to walsingham and the fact

53:16that 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 um and so to quote jesse childs in her wonderful prize winning book god's traitors which is all about the the recusants in

53:51elizabethan 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 burley say no this is subversion but they would be right to say that wouldn't they i mean conversion and subversion the same thing if you are a protestant minister of queen elizabeth indisputably yeah if you are a catholic priest i think you could say well i'm doing god's

54:23will 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 and those and and campion keeps very quiet about this because you can see you cannot possibly say oh well this is this is politically neutral we're just you know dominic you absolutely can and they do they do say that but people don't believe them 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

54:58what 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 um blood and thunder mercenary he's got a leather coat that's trimmed with gold braid he's got a feather in

55:31his cap massively fanboy and i think he's just a natural ham it's a good disguise though 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 he could possibly be a priest and so he crosses with no problem at all then campion follows the 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

56:08handed 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 rendezvous with persons um 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 um and campion you know he understands dominic where walsingham

56:44and you are coming from he knows that he is being accused of treason and so he writes um 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 and his instructions to his fellow catholics are should i be captured then send this letter to the privy council so that they

57:15can 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 so this

57:50is also what um campion has written the expense is reckoned the enterprise has 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 do you think that's unfair do you think i mean he's not saying anything just just

58:23reading 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 being i suppose a kind of you know a part of a religious shock force but um 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 you know to draw the analogy with

58:55the cambridge traitors that's what's kind of shocking to the british establishment was that chaps who'd been to decent colleges and yeah belong to clubs in saint 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 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 um

59:32there's a kind of charisma to a sort of you know that fascinates his enemies as much as his adherents 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 um heroic man i think um 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 but 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

1:00:10tours 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 but you know for months and months he's not caught and the whole protestant spy agency are looking out for

1:00:43him so he that also adds to his kind of glamour i think the sense of him as uh 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 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 um pamphlet listen elizabeth mighty queen the prophet in

1:01:17speaking 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 liford grange in berkshire and actually the people are coming to who find him were not specifically looking for him they were looking for

1:01:48other 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 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 um you know he's been really bigging up all the stuff about plots and things um funded by the pope assassinations of elizabeth i think coming up with material that

1:02:23wasn'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 and 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 he's um 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

1:02:58because 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 um because the rack is waiting and 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 burley in 1575 without torture i know we shall not prevail golly very uh war on terror kind of dick cheney

1:03:33isn't it what's it um enhanced interrogation techniques uh 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 of um elizabeth's judicial authorities by directly name checking the prospect of torture so he 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 uh what the protestant authorities would do

1:04:08because 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 he's not being tortured he's being subjected to various inquiries so there's a judicial inquiry led by uh 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 no other reference books and then

1:04:43a 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 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

1:05:19an 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 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

1:05:55and 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 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

1:06:28about 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 and of course persons is still on the scene but he manages to 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

1:07:07his 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 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 so for walsingham's men they are stopping the proselytization of potential catholics it's destroying

1:07:48a foreign funded campaign of subversion yeah 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 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

1:08:24paranoia as you always do when there's a kind of espionage war going on and because this is um 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 but a drama that's not just playing out in the shadows tom it's not just a story about spies and um back rooms and priest holes and double agents is it it's also a story of swashbuckling sea dogs it is right and

1:08:55that's what we'll be turning to next time so in the next episode from the coast of california to the straits of mcgellan 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 so loads of excitement loads of rough action loads of swashbuckling sword play

1:09:31to 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

1:10:07our 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 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 yeah it's absolutely amazing story it's one of the most um lurid implausible and entertaining of all 19th century imperial adventures so i'm really looking

1:10:44forward 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 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 the rest is history.com i think you should just bookmark the rest is history.com and buy everything it's got to offer so on that bombshell we'll be back next time with sir francis drake goodbye bye