It was in these dangerous and uncertain times, driven on by the thrill of a great adventure, that two young Englishmen arrived at the port of Boulogne in the summer of 1578. They were quickly caught up in one of the spasms of religious war in northern France. They saw ‘cruel and heavy spectacles’ of killing and came close to danger themselves, robbed by soldiers and stripped down to their shirts. They sought safety in Amiens, where an English Catholic priest called Father Woodward gave them help. The two young men then went to Paris and there played a little at espionage, handing over the letters of English Catholics they had met to Elizabeth’s ambassador at the French court, Sir Amias Paulet. From Paris they moved to Lyons. In Milan, where they arrived on Christmas Eve, they lodged in the palace of Cardinal Charles Borromeo. From Milan they went to Bologna, Florence and Siena, and then finally to Rome, where they enrolled in the English seminary to study grammar. One of the young men, Thomas Nowell, signed the register of the seminary using his real name. His friend used a false one, writing the Latinized ‘Antonius Auleus’. In English he probably called himself Anthony Hawley, though in fact his name was Anthony Munday.
Munday, eighteen years old and a restless soul, was a budding writer and young adventurer who fell into spying by accident. On his travels he grasped an opportunity, quickly realizing that he was able to tell the extraordinary tale of how he had seen and heard for himself the wicked conspiracies of Queen Elizabeth’s Catholic enemies. When Munday returned at last from Rome to London he sold his story, writing pamphlets and short books in lively and vigorous English. He wrote for Londoners like himself – those perhaps in trade or business, young lawyers, civic officials or merchants’ apprentices, browsing the shops of booksellers and stationers near St Paul’s Cathedral – and in learning his craft as a popular writer he showed that he had a show-man’s touch for dramatic timing. In London he also gave public evidence against young priests who had been his friends in Rome. The priests, like Munday himself, had by then come back to England. Unlike Munday, they were captured by the authorities, imprisoned and tried for treason. Munday, confronting his former friends with the evidence of their conspiracies, helped to see them to the gallows. All of this happened within the space of two years, between February 1579, when Nowell and Munday arrived in Rome, and the priests’ trials in November 1581. What began for Anthony Munday as the adventure of an impetuous young man became a deadly serious career as an unofficial agent of Elizabeth’s government.
He was the son of Jane and Christopher Munday, who on 13 October 1560 had him baptized at St Gregory-by-St Paul’s, a church built tight against the south-west transept of London’s great Gothic cathedral. Near by was the hall of the Stationers’ Company, the trade body of Elizabethan printers and booksellers, whose shops were clustered around the cathedral’s churchyard. Here stood the great Paul’s Cross, an octagonal pulpit with a lead roof, where Londoners came to hear public sermons and recantations of religious error. The pulpit was at the heart of the busy city.
Elizabethan London was a crowded, suffocating, jostling world of pleasure, business and life. The old city was bounded by its ancient walls and gates as far east as the Tower of London and as far west as Bridewell Palace on the River Thames. Beyond Fleet Street and the Temple Bar one entered Westminster and the world of law and politics, dominated by the grand houses of the nobility and the law courts of Westminster Hall but above all by the royal palace of Whitehall. South of the Thames from London Bridge was Southwark, with its bear gardens, inns and taverns, theatres and brothels, Bankside and the Paris Garden. London Bridge was built high with shops and houses; from it were displayed on poles the severed heads of traitors. An armada of small boats carried passengers up and down the river between wharves and landing steps that led to an intricate warren of alleyways and streets. Taking a boat on the Thames for a few pennies was the easiest way to move quickly through a congested and chaotic city.
The streets of London and Westminster were jammed with people and traffic. The population had risen from forty or fifty thousand in 1500 to about two hundred thousand nearly a century later. The city was a dense and chronically overcrowded tangle of town houses and squalid tenements, shops, churches, official buildings, prisons, trade halls, streets and alleyways. It was a city of immense contrasts, exciting as well as dangerous. Great wealth rubbed shoulders with terrible poverty. The city was ridden with disease. Plague, a frequent visitor, killed thousands of Elizabethan Londoners. And everywhere there was a confusion of people, the very rich and the destitute, natives of the city, travellers from other parts of the kingdom, refugees from foreign wars: nobility and gentry, well-to-do merchants, household servants, city officials, constables and law officers, vagrants, pick-pockets, nightwalkers and prostitutes. All of these men and women lived, worked, traded, ate, drank and begged in the same crowded streets.
So Anthony Munday, born amongst people and noise, was very much a city boy. And from Anthony’s earliest years, in and around Paul’s Cross churchyard, his was a world of books. Christopher Munday was a bookseller, and his son’s life was influenced from childhood by ink, paper and the printing press. Anthony was an orphan by 1571, a fact which helps to explain why he was later free to wander the cities of Europe. It is likely that he was educated by a Huguenot called Claude de Sainleins (or Claudius Hollyband), a schoolmaster who taught three languages Anthony was keen to learn: Latin, French and Italian.
In August 1576, when he was fifteen, Munday ‘put himself apprentice’ to the printer John Allde. Already Munday was an aspiring writer. In 1577 he composed a ‘Defence of poverty’ and wrote a ballad called ‘Munday’s dream’ in August 1578. Soon after that he set out on his journey to Rome. He was bound to Allde for eight years, but he stayed for only two. Outwardly there were no bad feelings on the part of his master, for later Allde gave a testimonial that as his apprentice Munday ‘did his duty in all respects, as much as I could desire, without fraud, covin [treachery] or deceit’. On Munday’s return from Rome in 1579 Allde was to print The Mirrour of Mutabilitie, the first time Munday wrote of his travels abroad.
Munday had the itch for adventure. For seventeen years he had lived in the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral, hearing foreign languages and voices and reading books about other places. In that small area of London lived men and women born in Flanders, France and Germany. In fact there were more than seven thousand of these ‘strangers’ in the city and its suburbs, many in search of work, others Protestant refugees from war and persecution. Anthony Munday knew that there was a wide world beyond the packed streets of the city. He wanted to travel further than John Allde’s printing-house at the Long Shop adjoining St Mildred’s church in the Poultry, on the corner of Scalding Alley, east of St Paul’s. He was bored and he wanted adventure. He said so in his dedicatory introduction to The Mirrour of Mutabilitie:
But at that time being very desirous to attain to some understanding in the languages, considering in time to come: I might reap thereby some commodity, since as yet my web of youthful time was not fully woven, and my wild oats required to be furrowed in a foreign ground, to satisfy the trifling toys [idle or foolish fancies] that daily more and more frequented my busied brain: yielded myself to God and good fortune, taking on the habit of a traveller.
And so in the second half of 1578 Anthony Munday set off on his journey. He knew that he wanted to be a writer. Probably he had no idea that he would also become a spy.
The story Munday told of his experiences in Rome came out in tantalizing instalments between 1579 and 1582. He had a gift for keeping the readers of his pamphlets guessing. Each part of the tale was a fresh story of derring-do. He called his account his ‘English Roman life’. In it he revealed the secrets of the English College in Rome, where about forty young men were being trained to return to England as priests of the Catholic faith. Munday knew that his Elizabethan readers would be horrified by what they read. Rome, as Munday described it, was a place of sin and danger; it was the heart of the enemy’s camp. Remembering back to what he and his friend Thomas Nowell had thought when they first arrived in the city, Munday wrote: ‘we might well judge Rome to be Hell itself’.
The two young men had made that arrival at dusk on Sunday, 1 February 1579, lodging overnight at an osteria in the city. The following day they went to find the English College, ‘a house both large and fair’ on the Via Monserrato near the Castel Sante Angelo. As soon as they entered the college, students bustled round them, asking about the latest news from England. A man walked by, carrying dozens of wax candles, gifts from the Pope and blessed by him at high mass that day. It was Candlemas, the commemoration of the purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the presentation of Christ in the Temple. The candles, they were told, were signs of the Pope’s favour.
The two young travellers were welcomed as pilgrims with eight days’ free lodging. They delivered letters from Paris to the rector of the college, Maurice Clenock (or Morys Clynnog), a Welshman in his early fifties, a graduate of the University of Oxford and a dabbler in plans for the Catholic invasion of England and Wales. Young Nowell and Munday must have been exhausted. The truth hiding behind Munday’s easy heroic narrative was hinted at by Robert Persons, a priest whom they would soon meet in the college. Persons wrote privately of two youths at first turned away from the seminary but eventually admitted because they ‘were like to perish in the streets for want’.
Munday, however tired he was, had to think on his feet. It was the cost of hiding his true identity. The surname he was using, Hawley, was that of an English gentleman. Anthony was pretending to be his son. The scholars of the seminary, fresh from dinner, took Nowell to one side. But Munday was asked by a priest to walk with him in the garden. The priest, who knew young Master Hawley’s supposed father, asked why he was in Rome. He was not impressed by Munday’s answer. ‘Trust me sir,’ Munday said, ‘only for the desire I had to see it, that when I came home again, I might say, once in my life I have been at Rome.’
As a gifted writer Munday had a great ear for dialogue. He also knew what his London readers wanted to hear, the horrors and conspiracies of Rome given a voice. So it is no surprise that in the college’s garden the priest denounced the heresy of ‘that proud usurping Jezebel’, Queen Elizabeth, likening her to the queen of Israel whose body (so the Old Testament tells us) was devoured by dogs: ‘I hope ere long the dogs shall tear her flesh, and those that be her props and upholders.’ Out of his pocket the priest drew a piece of paper containing the names of Elizabeth’s privy councillors. He called the paper ‘a bead-roll’, a list of people to be specially prayed for. This was sharp irony. These heretics, he said, would soon be held to account for their crimes. They did not know ‘what is providing for them, and I hope shall not know, till it fall upon them’.
Munday gave the priest to whom he spoke in the garden sinister anonymity. With the name of Robert Persons, however, he was much freer, for by the time Munday wrote up his story for the London printing presses Persons, educated at Oxford and ordained a priest of the Society of Jesus – a Jesuit – in July 1578, was one of the most able adversaries of Elizabeth’s rule and a wanted man in England. He was about thirty-two years old when Munday met him, able, confident, even charismatic. Munday captured something of his character. He described how Persons had often sat on a chair in the middle of the student body, ‘when he would open unto us, in what miserable and lamentable estate our country of England stood’. Persons even prayed ‘for that gracious and thrice-blessed queen’ – Mary Queen of Scots, Elizabeth’s rival, ‘now held down by that Jezebel’s oppression’.
Munday made it clear that the English College was poisoned by treason. When he fell seriously ill, his fellow students came to sit by his bedside and made what Munday called ‘horrible speeches’ against their prince and country. One of the scholars even said to Anthony: ‘You may be happy, if God take you out of this world here: then shall you never see the bloody ruin of your own country.’ Once he had recovered from his sickness, Munday went out one day to the place of Saint Peter’s martyrdom with two other scholars. As usual they talked about England. One of them said: ‘While two or three persons be alive, we may stand in doubt of our matter in England.’ ‘Who be they?’ Munday asked. Out of delicacy to his readers he gave initials only, but they were three of Elizabeth’s leading advisers, of whom two were Lord Burghley, the queen’s lord treasurer, and Sir Francis Walsingham, her secretary. ‘Oh,’ Munday’s companion continued, ‘had I the hearts of these in my purse, and their heads in the Pope’s Holiness’ hands: I would not doubt but ere long, we should all merrily journey homeward.’
Yet Anthony Munday found companionship in Rome as well as treason. Luke Kirby, a priest born in Yorkshire, visited Munday when he was sick, and they became friends. Kirby was about thirty-one years old and a former student of Louvain. We know, thanks to another English spy in Rome, that he had brown hair and a short beard, that his teeth were slightly crooked, and that he spoke with a mild stammer. Munday made other friends too and enjoyed for the first time in his life the rhythm of life in a community of students. Here Munday’s gift for writing great narrative was at its best, his ear for dialogue, his nose for scandal. He turned upon the English College those weapons he possessed: a sharp eye, a quick intelligence and a lively pen.
There is an easy descriptive quality to Munday’s account of the daily lives of the college’s students in their ‘house both large and fair’. Four or six scholars shared a chamber, and each scholar had a bed made up of two small trestles with four or five boards and a quilted mattress. The porter rang a bell first thing in the morning, at which the students turned up their beds. A second bell marked prayers, and the scholars spent half an hour on their knees in private devotion. A third bell was the signal for silent study, each scholar reading at his desk. After this the students went from their chambers to the refectory for a breakfast of one glass of wine and a quarter of a manchet loaf, a bread of the best quality. Teaching followed for most of the morning, with the scholars walking in pairs to their lectures at the Collegium Romanum – the Roman College – which had been founded, like the Society of Jesus, by Ignatius Loyola. Some went to lectures in divinity, others to physic, logic or rhetoric. The students had time before their midday meal in the English College to walk in its gardens.
Dinner in the refectory was announced by the porter’s bell. The custom, Munday wrote, was for two students to take it in turns to serve everyone at the table, helped by the butler, the porter and a poor Jesuit. Small dishes for each scholar were set out on a round table, and every boy and man helped himself, ready prepared with his trencher, knife, fork and spoon, a manchet loaf covered by a white napkin, a glass and a pot of wine standing near by. The food was very fine indeed, beginning with antipasto of meat, Spanish anchovies or syrup of stewed prunes and raisins. The second course was a mess of pottage. Munday, a young man with a ready appetite, enjoyed what he ate but barely knew what was in the pottage, ‘made of divers things, whose proper names I do not remember: but methought they were both good and wholesome’. Boiled and then roasted meats followed. To finish there were cheese, figs, almonds and raisins, perhaps a lemon and sugar, a pomegranate, ‘or some such sweet gear [stuff, substance]: for they know that Englishmen loveth sweetmeats’. This was indeed very fine dining.
While the scholars ate their main meal of the day, they listened to the reading of a chapter of the Latin Vulgate Bible and then, according to Munday though contested by his Catholic opponents, from their special book of martyrs that recorded the lives of some Tudor Englishmen executed for high treason. One of the martyrs, Munday said, was John Felton, the young Catholic hanged in 1570 for pinning to the gate of the Bishop of London’s palace the bull of excommunication against Elizabeth. Munday was saying, not very subtly, that the English College in Rome trained priests whose object was to destroy Queen Elizabeth and her Protestant kingdoms.
Excellent food and edifying verses were followed by an hour of recreation and then, once again marked by the ringing of the porter’s bell, private study mulling over the morning’s lecture. Scholars went off to the Roman College for another hour of teaching in the afternoon before returning to the English College for a further glass of wine and a quarter of manchet. After this they would withdraw to their chambers, to be called later to scholarly disputations. There was time before supper for more recreation. Munday described how after supper in winter the Jesuits gathered the scholars round a great fire to say terrible things about Elizabeth, her privy councillors and bishops. The students went back to their chambers when the bell rang, and the porter came to light the lamps by which they laid out their beds ready for the night, studying for a little while at their desks. Another bell marked the time for prayer, and priests would begin the Latin litany, the scholars giving the responses. At last they all went to bed.
This was the steady rhythm of the community’s life in Rome. It would have been familiar to any student who had studied in a college in Cambridge or Oxford, something Munday, of course, had not. He was a city boy, an orphan, self-sufficient, clever and enterprising, and he did not take well to the discipline of an institution with strict rules for behaviour. Punishments were very much part of the life of a young scholar in the sixteenth century, and Munday relished describing them graphically, knowing full well that his Elizabethan readers saw the Jesuits in particular as the shock troops of the Catholic Antichrist, hardened by strict discipline. Munday made everything he could of their zeal. He knew all the small punishments for minor offences: a scholar not turning up his bed in the morning, or not going down on his knees for prayer, or failing to hear mass before lectures, or forgetting to put his wooden peg in its place to signify whether he was in or out of the college. Munday was punished for all of these offences, ‘albeit it were with an ill will’. He had done penance by reading to fellow scholars in the refectory; he had been on his knees in the hall; he had even had to stand with his mess of pottage on the floor before him, scooping up each spoonful. There were also private penances. Munday described how scholars would whip themselves in the refectory, their identity disguised by a pointed hood with eye holes and wearing a special canvas cape that showed a naked back; he had seen the blood trickle to the ground. A Jesuit instructed him in this kind of whipping, which was done with cords of wire. Munday’s readers may have remembered a book printed a few years before, an account of the terrors of the holy inquisition, in which the inquisitors wore the same pointed hoods Munday saw in the English College. Here the propaganda value of his writings for Elizabeth’s government was tangible. The enemy appeared real and terrifying.
Anthony Munday had an eighteen-year-old’s delight in a trencher piled with good food and a scholar’s wariness of physical punishment. He possessed all the paradoxes of a Tudor spy. He embraced an institution but kicked against its discipline. He made good friends but later betrayed them to the Elizabethan authorities. He was ambiguous about his faith. Why, after all, had he wanted to study in a Catholic seminary so far from home? Always elusive, at best he told only half a story but he did so with great style.
And Munday thoroughly enjoyed himself in Rome, thriving on the dangerous glamour of the city at a time of carnival: ‘the noise and hurly-burly’, the horses and coaches, the courtesans displaying themselves at their windows, the disguises, and even murder committed behind those masks. Munday the Londoner, used as he was to the packed streets around St Paul’s Cathedral, said he was amazed by the goings on around him. He wrote to surprise his readers. He related how the Jews of Rome raced naked for over a mile to the city’s ancient capitol. He described what he called the Pope’s ‘cursing’ on Maundy Thursday, when Pope Gregory, holding a great painted holy candle, was carried in his chair to the gallery over St Peter’s basilica, with cardinals singing ‘the Pope’s general malediction’ in mockery of a blessing, cursing Queen Elizabeth, who was, they said, worse than even the cruellest tyrant in the world. That same night Munday saw wicked people gather themselves into the company of the Holy Ghost, the company of charity and the company of death. They walked with crucifixes before them, carrying torches and whipping themselves. Munday described for Protestant Elizabethans a chilling scene of evil.
To Munday, Rome was a city corrupted by the unholy greed of the Catholic Church. He visited the seven chief basilicas and churches of the city, walking a circuit long used by pilgrims. In the churches he met those who came on pilgrimage to the rotten bones of saints. He discovered at the root of everything money and greed, lazy worthless friars and men and women stunned by the fake holiness of supposed relics. This was what Munday expected of the Catholic Church of Antichrist, ‘the eldest child of Hell’. The first basilica he described was St Peter’s, where Munday saw a great rock made of brass upon which, so Catholics said, Jesus spoke to Saint Peter and pronounced Peter to be the rock upon which Christ would build his Church. Everywhere Anthony found venerated bones and objects. In St Peter’s were the remains of the apostles Peter and Paul, the spear that was thrust into Christ’s side at his crucifixion, and the handkerchief used to wipe Jesus’ face on the way to the place of his execution at Golgotha. He discovered in the church of St John Lateran what were claimed to be pieces of the true cross along with a single bloodied nail, as well as the first shirt made for Jesus by his mother Mary, a glass vial of Christ’s blood, and a piece of his coat with his blood still fresh upon it. At Santa Maria Maggiore Munday saw some of the thirty pence received by Judas when he betrayed Jesus. Munday found three or four more pieces of Judas’ silver in Santa Croce. Everywhere Munday saw worthless relics of idolatry and superstition, so much a part of the false religion of Rome Protestant Elizabethans held in contempt.
Munday was in Rome at an important and difficult time for the city’s English community. For months the seminary had been riven by a factional tussle between the scholars from England and their Welsh rector Maurice Clenock. Their argument reached a crisis in the spring of 1579. Expelled by Clenock, the English scholars appealed to the Pope, who met them on Ash Wednesday, 4 March. As the result of the audience, Pope Gregory XIII reinstated the students and dismissed Clenock from office. Munday gave an eyewitness account of the meeting. It is a compelling piece of writing. With tears trickling down his white beard, Gregory had said:
O you Englishmen, to whom my love is such as I can no way utter, considering that for me you have left your prince, which was your duty, and come so far to me, which is more than I deserve, yet as I am your refuge when persecution dealeth straitly with you in your country by reason of the heretical religion there used, so I will be your bulwark to defend you, your guide to protect you, your Father to nourish you, and your friend with my heart-blood to do you any profit.
‘Behold,’ Munday continued, ‘what deceits the Devil hath to accomplish his desire: tears, smooth speeches, liberality [generosity], and a thousand means to make a man careless of God, disobedient to his prince, and more, to violate utterly the faith of a subject.’
So Anthony Munday came face to face with Antichrist, and even kissed his foot. But who was Munday on that day in Rome? Was he the young tearaway scholar, the orphan traveller on a great adventure, the spy, or merely a shy young man awed by the majesty of Pope Gregory? That identity Munday never revealed: it was probably the greatest secret of his months in Rome.
Anthony Munday’s ‘English Roman life’ belongs as much to literature as it does to history. Though in some senses a work of the imagination, it is a powerful account of the visit by a young man to the camp of Queen Elizabeth’s most determined enemies. Munday’s story says something of the ever-shifting points of his personality and of his acute intelligence. He was at various times a brave traveller on an adventure and a scared boy driven to the English College by near starvation. He was the hero of his own story, the enterprising clever scholar who uncovered the secrets of the Catholic enemy. Above all he was a gifted writer who told a story he knew would both thrill and terrify his fellow Elizabethans. Between the years 1579 and 1582, when London was gripped by news of the trials and executions of priests he had known in Rome, Munday’s bestselling account revealed the face of treason and conspiracy. He helped to fix in the Elizabethan mind’s eye a lurid and frightening image of a trans-European plot against Elizabeth, revealing the terrible resolution of the queen’s enemies.
A sure mark of Anthony Munday’s success as a spy turned writer was the enemy’s robust response to his charges of conspiracy and treason. Pained by the perversions of Munday’s revelations of life in Rome, first set out in The Mirrour of Mutabilitie (1579), Doctor William Allen, the inspirational leader of English Catholics in exile, wrote in 1581 to defend the two English seminaries in Rome and in Rheims. With great power, Allen set out his cause to save English souls, defending from the unjust laws made against them Elizabeth’s ‘Catholic and loyal subjects’. He explained that the mission’s purpose was to send priests secretly into England, for which they were trained in the English College. In sparkling prose he wrote:
This is the way, by which we hope to win our nation to God again. We put not our trust in princes or practices [schemes, stratagems, plots] abroad, nor in arms or forces at home. This is our fight, and for this war, the Society of Jesus and our seminaries were instituted, to this … our priests and students are trained.
So carefully and finely crafted, these are words to remember in the following chapters.
William Allen knew better than to use Anthony Munday’s name, for he did not want to dignify with recognition Munday’s supposed revelations. Instead Doctor Allen denounced certain young fellows and fugitives who, after running away from their masters, had dabbled in forgery and theft. They had joined others of ill disposition ‘that sometimes thrust themselves secretly into such companies living together as we do’. These fellows who reported on others out of malice and for money Allen called spies and intelligencers. When he wrote of ‘false brethren’, he had Anthony Munday very much in mind. The great Doctor Allen named Munday’s true profession: the young Londoner, the traveller and writer and in the end the betrayer, was before everything else a spy.
Anthony Munday was supremely sure of himself. Making use of his secret identity, he had seen what to Elizabethans was the truth of Rome. He heard treason with his own ears. He was a young man and could not match the subtle dignity of Doctor Allen’s prose. He wrote instead with fire and passion, publishing in 1581 a defiant manifesto in verse:
O Rome, the room, where all outrage is wrought,
The See 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.
…
Let Pope, let Turk [infidel or heathen], let Satan rage their fill:
God keepeth us, if we do keep his will.
Within a decade of the horror of the massacre in Paris, Munday’s great success was to show once again the terrible dangers facing Elizabeth. ‘Our Roman enemies’, as Munday called them in 1581, driven on by implacable faith, were at the gates of Elizabeth’s kingdom. Soon enough they would bring the battle to England.