THE EARLY JESUITS IN ENGLAND
The first attempts of the Jesuits to carry their war against Protestantism into the British Isles have been noticed, at their various dates, in previous chapters. We remember the brave and futile journey of Brouet and Salmeron in 1541; the labours of David Woulfe, of unhappy memory, in Ireland in 1560; the fruitless adventures of Gouda among the Scottish Calvinists in 1562; and the obscure apostolate of Father King in England in 1564. Three years after the last date, Father Edmund Hay had made an equally unprofitable expedition to Scotland. He and Thomas Darbyshire, a nephew of Bishop Bonner, had been directed to accompany a Nuncio on a fresh attempt to advise and confirm Queen Mary. The Nuncio had prudently remained in Paris, and sent Father Hay, an adventurous young Scot who loved disguises and the inspiring chances of politics, to explore the kingdom. He spent two months in hiding at Edinburgh in the early part of 1567, and returned to say that there was no hope of success. At last, in 1580, a very able and remarkable English Jesuit, Father Robert Parsons, opened that stirring chapter of Jesuit history which closes with the Gunpowder Plot.
Since the beginning of the Reformation in England a number of Catholic students had gone abroad, and many of them had entered the Jesuit novitiate in Belgium, Germany, and Italy. Father More has preserved in his Historia missionis Anglicanæ (1660) the names of about thirty Englishmen who figure in the chronicles of one or other province down to the year 1580. Of these the most important were Robert Parsons and Edmund Campion, who opened the mission of 1580. Parson, a Somersetshire man of the yeoman class, had been a fellow of Balliol, where he had attracted some attention by his ability, his religious vacillations, and his disagreeable temper. He was compelled to resign and go abroad in 1573. Some (Camden and others) say that he was expelled for dishonest conduct, others that he was a martyr to religious conviction; but Father Taunton concludes, in his excellent study of Parsons, that he left "on account of perpetual disagreements with his fellows." [15] At Louvain he met Father William Good, who induced him to go through the exercises, and he entered the Society at Rome in 1575. He was ordained priest, and made English confessor at St. Peter's in 1578. Edmund Campion, who was the son of a London bookseller and a brilliant Fellow of St. John's (Oxford), had meantime joined the Society and was at Prague. He had known Parsons at Oxford, and they corresponded when they both became Jesuits.
The peculiar circumstances which led to their mission, and had a most important bearing on its history, must next be told. A wealthy English priest, Dr. (afterwards Cardinal) Allen, had founded a college at Douai for supplying England with clergy to support the old faith. It was transferred to Rheims in 1578; and, as the free lodging and education which it offered to young refugees soon caused it to be overcrowded, a second college was opened at Rome and generously supported by the Pope. The Jesuit fathers lectured at this college. The rector, Dr. Clenock, was an injudicious Welshman, and the national prejudices of the English and Welsh students, who were a very turbulent lot, led to prolonged and most violent quarrels, which ended in the whole body of the young apostles marching out of the college. They demanded that the management of the college should be given to the Jesuits, and it is quite clear that the Jesuits encouraged their revolt. After a few months they found that the Jesuits also were unsuitable masters, and the trouble broke out afresh. It was then that Robert Parsons began his famous diplomatic career. He suggested that the Jesuits should co-operate with the secular priests on the English mission. General Mercurian and his counsellors demurred at first; there was no bishop in England to control the clergy, and they foresaw quarrels. The difficulty was removed by making the aged Bishop of St. Asaph ordinary for the whole of England, and inducing him to join the mission; and in April 1580, Parsons and Campion (who was summoned from Prague) set out on foot, with nine secular priests and a Jesuit lay-brother, Ralph Emerson, for Rheims.
It is disputed at what precise stage Parsons began to be a politician, but he was little known to the Papacy in 1580, and was certainly not admitted to its secret counsels. He learned at Rheims, however, that a mission of by no means a pacific character had at the same time been sent to Ireland, and we know that a third mission, also of a political nature, was sent to Scotland, to prepare the way for a French invasion. The English authorities would naturally conclude that the mission to England was a part of this political conspiracy against Elizabeth. They had spies all over Europe, and long before the apostles reached Rheims a pen-portrait of each of them was being studied and distributed to the pursuivants at Westminster. There had as yet been little enforcement of the penal laws, in spite of the Pope's unhappy interference with the loyalty of English Catholics. It was well known that mass was said in more than one house in London, and that many a quiet manor-house sheltered nuns and priests, but there was little disposition to persecute on account of belief, and as yet little inclination of the Catholics to active disloyalty. To admit Jesuits was a different matter. What did even the Catholics of France and Spain say of them? And when this coming of the Jesuits coincided with a political activity of Guise and the Papacy against the English throne, it was inevitable that the authorities should decide to be vigilant and stringent. The missionaries were not deterred; they left their aged bishop behind, and made their way, in separate parties, to the coast. At St. Omer's Parsons and Campion learned that their names and descriptions were known in London, and officers were on the watch for them, but the spirit of romance and devotion urged them on, and they planned their campaign.
It is an amusing and characteristic picture which Parsons draws of his journey to London. He was a big, burly man of thirty-four, and wore the uniform of an officer returning from the wars in the Low Countries. The befeathered hat and gold-laced coat and military swagger fitted him so nicely that the officers not only passed him, but got a horse for "the captain" and promised to pay every attention to his friend the jewel-merchant (Campion), who was to follow him in a few days. By the end of June they were together in the house that had been taken for them in Chancery Lane. At Rome, Parsons had met an enthusiastic and wealthy young Englishman named George Gilbert, and, instead of making a Jesuit of him, had sent him on in advance to prepare the way for them. He had boldly taken rooms for them under the nose of the chief official charged to arrest them—who was probably searching for them in the warrens by the river or the villages beyond the gates—and had formed a secret association of Catholics throughout the country to help them in their travels. The news soon spread through the Catholic world that two Jesuits were in England, and the secular priests, whom they met and endeavoured to conciliate, urged them to return to the Continent. It is difficult to look back and not see that they would best have served the cause of Catholicism in England by quitting it at once; the few thousand converts they made, or waverers whom they strengthened, were a small service in comparison with the fierce hostility they brought on the faithful, the political conspiracies in which they involved them, and the bitter dissensions they caused amongst the clergy. But for the coming of the Jesuits and the plots of foreign Catholics, Catholicism might have lived on in England as a considerable sect, overlooked by the authorities, until the Pope's blunder was forgotten and the penal spirit abandoned.
Yet we must respect the two Jesuits—to omit the humbler services of Emerson—for refusing to save their lives by an immediate flight, and no historian, whatever his religious views, can read that first chapter of their story in England without sympathy and admiration. Each was provided by Gilbert with two horses and two suits and a servant, and they bade farewell to each other and set out to make their way, separately, through the legions of spies and officers. When they entered a county, the secret members of the association would send warning to the scattered Catholics along the route, and it would be given out that an acquaintance was expected. Toward evening the Jesuit, in some strange disguise, would ride into the courtyard and receive, under the eyes of the servants, the common civilities which one owed to a passing acquaintance; but when the inner chamber was reached, and the door closed, master and mistress would fall on their knees and kiss the hand of the traveller, and the broad-brimmed hat would be removed to disclose the face of the priest invoking a blessing on the persecuted faithful. Then Catholic neighbours might come, and confessions be heard, and the evening would be spent in sober discussion of the awful catastrophe that had befallen their Church. In the early morning a chalice and an altar-stone and vestments would be found among the luggage of the supposed soldier or merchant, and the little group would gather in a guarded chamber for mass. Possibly in the midst of the ceremony the sentinel would whisper that the pursuivants were upon them, and some stolid Catholic servant would hold the men at the door until priests and vestments were safely lodged in the pit which had been dug beneath the floor or the secret chamber cut out of the solid wall. When mass was over, the disguised Jesuit would, as a rule, give a last blessing and take to the road again, dining at inns where he might see on the wall a description of himself and an intimation that the Government wanted to hang, draw, and quarter him. Parsons carried his bluff so far as to tear down one of these bills, and ask the landlord what he meant by confronting an honest traveller with reminders of that villainous Jesuit.