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Everywhere there are being dragged to prison noblemen and those of humble birth, men, women and even children … there comes a knock on the door, like that of a pursuivant; all start up and listen, like deer when they hear the huntsmen; we leave our food and commend ourselves to God … If it is nothing, we laugh at our fright.
It has always seemed odd that no one has made a film of Edmund Campion’s last months — Waugh’s biography would provide a wonderful starting-point — and God’s Secret Agents is fully alive to the drama of all the Catholic martyrs’ lives. The book opens with the secret landing of two other young English Jesuit priests on the Norfolk coast, and Alice Hogge is brilliant at evoking the climate of suspicion and fear that met them, the claustrophobic grip of the authorities over the countryside, the difficulties of movement in the months after the Armada, the precariousness and loneliness of a priest’s life, and the virtual certainty of betrayal, torture and a savagely brutal death.
If it is the stories of these men — the hunt for Campion himself, the crucial issue of equivocation that doomed Robert Southwell, the daring escape from the Tower of John Gerard, the extraordinary ingenuity of Nicholas Owen, the murky plottings that took Henry Garnet to the scaffold in the wake of the Gunpowder Plot — that provide the narrative excitement of this book, Hogge is also very good at showing just what this country lost when it became Protestant. The artistic and physical depredations of the Reformation are still an ever-present fact of the English landscape, but from the deaths under Henry VIII of Thomas More and John Fisher — two of the great figures of 16th-century European learning — the criminalising, persecution, enforced exile or execution of England’s leading Catholics impoverished the cultural and intellectual life of the country in a way that provides a sobering balance to all the vaunted Huguenot blessings that the next Protestant century brought.
The chronology of God’s Secret Agents is not always as clear as it might be, but if there is one criticism to be made it is that the book parades its colours a bit too obviously. It does not fudge the multiplicity of motives that fired the returning priests, or the streak of fanaticism with which some sought out martyrdom. Nor does it dissemble the bitterness of the struggle between the Jesuits and seculars that ripped the Catholic mission apart, but there is never much doubt where loyalties lie. The ambiguities of a lay Catholic’s position, with the intolerable burden of divided loyalties, are dealt with a good deal more sympathetically than the corresponding dilemma of a government faced with the threat of invasion and a dissident population. The savage Marian persecution of Protestant heretics surely demands more than the two or three lines it gets.aThe remark that ‘Latimer’s “candle” of martyrdom found a marked lack of oxygen in Oxford’ seems something less than generous. These, though, are details. And if Alice Hogge can sometimes seem unjust to Elizabethan England, she would have every right to point to the intervening centuries of Protestant triumphalism still commemorated by Bonfire Night, and echo E. M. Forster’s response when a reader of A Passage to India accused him of being ‘unfair’ to the British Raj. ‘Ah, but you see,’ he replied, ‘I didn’t want to be fair.’
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