On 9 July 1579 Anthony Munday was at Douai in the Low Countries, on the way home to London, fame, notoriety and modest fortune. Only four days before, on the first Sunday of the month, a fellow Englishman arrived in the city Munday had left weeks earlier. This other traveller’s name, probably, was Charles Sledd.
We know practically nothing of Sledd’s life. The facts are few. He spent the months between July 1579 and February 1580 in Rome, returning to England by way of France in May 1580. In London he became an energetic, even a ferocious, pursuer of Catholic priests living secretly in the city. Sledd may not have been his real name; for a time, in Paris, he probably borrowed the identity of one Rowland Russell. He was clever, literate and used to travelling. There is evidence to suggest that he may have been a merchant’s apprentice in London in the early 1570s. He was probably in 1579 still a young man (somewhere in his middle twenties) and employable as a household servant, one of the best covers for the work of an Elizabethan spy. Certainly he had a sharp eye for detail and a keen memory for conversations and faces.
Sledd wrote a long narrative of his months in Rome, an extraordinary record of the Catholic Englishmen of the city, their dinners, their meetings and their conspiracies. Whereas Anthony Munday sold the story of his ‘English Roman life’ from the shops of London’s printers and booksellers, Sledd’s narrative, to which he gave the very Elizabethan title of ‘A general discourse of the Pope’s Holiness’ devices’, was a secret document read only at the highest levels of Elizabeth’s government. Later it was used as evidence in one of the most important treason trials of the reign.
And so Charles Sledd the spy is a mystery. He was a careful chronicler, watching and recording. He was also a man who volunteered to hunt down his country’s enemies, fired by passion and probably by hatred too. He betrayed others completely and deliberately. He lived and travelled with men he later arrested on the streets of London, and gave evidence against them in a public trial. What were his motivations? The fact was that the silent observer in Rome, listening and noting, came to possess in London a terrible energy. For Catholics Sledd was the great betrayer, employed in Rome as a lowly servant, later giving false witness against men of God. To William Allen, Sledd was as much a hypocrite and a liar as Anthony Munday had been. Both men had pretended to be Catholics to serve their own ends. Sledd, indeed, had taken the holy sacrament while spying on his master, playing (in Allen’s words) ‘these Judas his parts’.
When Sledd arrived in Rome on Sunday, 5 July 1579 he went to stay at the house of an Englishman called Salamon Aldred. Aldred, a Londoner, was a hosier by trade, and his wife’s family had given them the very substantial sum of three hundred crowns to be able to live in Rome. Sledd’s stay with Aldred was only temporary, for he wanted to take advantage of the eight days of free hospitality at the English College for English pilgrims to Rome. The condition, not surprisingly, was that he should be a good Catholic. From the beginning, Sledd was under scrutiny. When at last he went along to the English College he was questioned about his faith ‘very inquisitively’.
The Englishmen of Rome were on the look out for spies. Sledd was alerted to this by an old acquaintance called Robert Barret, a runaway apprentice now in Rome, whom Sledd had known in London. Barret warned him to be careful of what he said: the suspicion was that Sledd was a spy. Barret also revealed to Sledd that there was a conspiracy afoot. Barret was the servant of a former Welsh bishop, Thomas Goldwell, one of the grandest of the Catholic exiles in Rome. Goldwell, he claimed, was involved in a plot by the Pope and the King of Spain against Elizabeth’s England. Sledd, too, would hear all about it if he stayed on in Rome. Barret advised Sledd to go to confession at St Peter’s, something he later did. It very probably saved him from prison. Briefed by Barret, and now knowing something of what was happening in the city, Sledd later wrote that he was able to behave like any other Catholic in Rome.
Sledd was given a tour of the scholars’ rooms in the English College by none other than Luke Kirby, the young priest born in Yorkshire who had befriended Anthony Munday. Like Munday, Sledd was impressed by what he saw: three or four young men to each bedchamber, and these rooms ‘very finely decked and every man his bed appointed alone’. Afterwards Kirby and Sledd went to the room of a gentleman called John Pascall – Pascall was one of the most important Catholic Englishmen in Rome – where they were joined by three other priests. Sledd, still not yet trusted as a reliable Catholic, was questioned closely.
On Monday, 13 July Sledd’s eight days of hospitality as a pilgrim expired. It was time for him to go to confession: either that or he was in danger of showing himself ‘to be of a contrary opinion than I had professed to be’ – that is, not the good Catholic he had claimed. He chose confession. The English Jesuit who gave Sledd absolution also gave him a certificate written in Latin, the ‘outward show and manifest token’ that he was a Catholic. Sledd was free at last to move about Rome in safety; he was no longer under suspicion. A day later he went back to Salamon Aldred’s house. Sledd had loaned money to Aldred in London about two years before, and so the two men came to the arrangement that Aldred would give Sledd board and lodging as a way of settling the debt.
Sledd now kept his eyes and ears open. He began also to use his pen, keeping a journal with short entries for each day. By now it was August 1579, the month Pope Gregory XIII visited the English College, giving it the fantastic patronage of a yearly pension of 3,000 crowns and a charter of statutes. The greatest news of all, however, was the Pope’s summoning to Rome of Doctor William Allen and the new exciting phase of Allen’s mission to rescue England from heresy. Doctor Allen was expected in Rome any day. His presence would dominate Sledd’s narrative in the months to come.
In fact Rome was buzzing with the anticipation of England’s freedom from the tyranny of the heretics in Elizabeth’s government. Sledd reported his candid conversations with Catholic Englishmen in the city concerning the invasion of England and Ireland. They were excited at the Pope’s support for a military expedition of Spanish troops led by an Irish adventurer called Sir James Fitzmaurice and an English priest, Nicholas Sander, to the south-west coast of Ireland. Fitzmaurice, Sander and their men set sail in June 1579, so it was no wonder that the prospects for their mission, for which there was huge optimism, were avidly discussed by English Catholics in Rome. In late August Salamon Aldred gave what Sledd called a ‘solemn dinner’ at which the guests talked about the Fitzmaurice expedition, as well as the prospects for Queen Elizabeth’s proposed union with the Duke of Anjou, one of the most controversial of her marriage negotiations. Was it possible, they wondered, that the queen could really marry a French Catholic, the son of Catherine de’ Medici? After Aldred’s dinner Luke Kirby and another priest invited Sledd to join them both in the English College ‘and by that means to make me priest for to serve my country shortly’.
Most exciting of all, however, was the arrival in Rome of William Allen. This happened three days after Aldred’s dinner. It happened to be the same day that Sledd found work in the household of Nicholas Morton, a graduate of Cambridge and a Catholic churchman. Sledd was in the best possible position to be able to act as an eyewitness of truly historic events.
It would be hard to overestimate the authority and moral standing of William Allen in 1579. He was the great hope of English Catholics in exile. He was their guide, organizer and moral compass. To the government of Queen Elizabeth, however, he was probably the most determined and dangerous enemy England possessed other than Mary Queen of Scots: certainly he was the cleverest, the most intellectually assured and the most committed.
Born in Lancashire in 1532 and educated at Oxford University, where he became a fellow of Oriel College and principal of St Mary Hall, Allen had left England soon after the Protestant Church settlement had become law in 1559, travelling and teaching for a time in the Low Countries. He returned home for a time to recover from a serious illness. It was not an easy convalescence: Allen saw at first hand the compromises in their faith that Catholic men and women were making even in a part of England as resistant to Protestantism as Lancashire. The experience shaped him profoundly. Leaving England for good in 1565, Allen went to Antwerp. Three years later he founded a seminary to train priests in the town of Douai in the Low Countries which had moved, by the time Allen was in Rome in 1579, to Rheims in France.
Allen was without doubt the spiritual leader of the mission to lead Elizabeth’s England away from heresy back to the Catholic faith. He was passionate, single-minded and determined. At Douai and then at Rheims he trained and drilled the storm-troops of the mission, the young priests who were sent to England to begin the essential work of saving souls. He also became an astute politician, involved from the early 1570s in efforts to persuade the Pope and the King of Spain to mount an invasion of England. Allen was a brilliant polemicist and one of the best English prose stylists of the sixteenth century; he wrote stingingly effective attacks on what he saw as a vicious persecution of the true faithful. What Charles Sledd sensed in August 1579, instinctively and correctly, was the nervous hopeful excitement of a reinvigorated mission to send priests to work secretly in England. Above all, the English community in Rome anticipated the strength and single-mindedness of Doctor Allen’s commitment to save his country from Protestantism.
Not surprisingly, September and October 1579 were months of busyness and preparation in Rome. William Allen made his dispositions for the English mission, taking ten men – priests and important laymen – for an audience with Pope Gregory. Afterwards Allen had a private conference with the Pope. With him was John Pascall, Allen’s right hand in organizing the mission, his guide, his company during meals, his closest adviser. What Allen wanted to secure was the Pope’s blessing and material support for sending priests secretly to England.
Eight days later, with Sledd in attendance upon his master Nicholas Morton and watching and listening carefully, Allen spoke to the guests he had invited to dine with him in the English College. Eighteen men were there. Sledd knew all of them by sight and a few more intimately, and later in his journal he recorded their names and physical descriptions. Two of the diners were Robert Persons, the young Jesuit priest whom Anthony Munday had known in the English College, and William Allen’s confidant John Pascall. But at the centre of everything and everyone was Doctor Allen himself, whose purpose that day was to rally the troops of the faith, to look to the recovery of England. In Allen – in his energy and political savvy, in his intellectual assurance – lay the future hope of their homeland’s freedom.
Sledd remembered even the smallest physical features of the man who stood before them, in his late forties, tall and slim, with a reddish beard. The spy noted the wrinkles in his face, the small mole over his right eye, the way his long fingernails rose up at their tips. He absorbed every detail. Most importantly of all, Sledd remembered Doctor Allen’s words.
Allen told them all how he had come to Rome at Pope Gregory’s commandment and how generous Gregory had been in supporting the English seminaries in Rome and Rheims. Like the Englishmen in Rome, the Pope wanted to see their homeland restored to the Catholic faith. Allen ‘thundered out in speech’ the expedition to Ireland of Nicholas Sander, James Fitzmaurice and five hundred Spanish troops. The force they led to the Tudor kingdom of Ireland was a promise of the full invasion to come. Allen said that the Pope and other Catholic princes were prepared to do even more than this. And then he spoke of the English mission, the rescue of the kingdom from Protestant heresy, with Gregory’s support and encouragement. Allen’s speech must have been an extraordinary and moving one, revealing his persuasive power to inspire and to motivate. Six priests were recruited for the mission there and then. They were told to get themselves ready to leave for England by the end of the month.
Allen lost no time. Full of missionary zeal, he and John Pascall went to the Pope to tell him of the six priests and to ask Gregory for money to support the enterprise. They were given three hundred crowns. The priests, Sledd wrote, ‘vaunted and boasted not a little in the city how they would hazard their lives for their country’s sake’. Blessed by the Pope, the six men set off from Rome for England on the feast day of Saint Simon and Saint Jude, Wednesday, 28 October. Many more would eventually follow them. The new phase of the mission had begun.
In late November Nicholas Morton hosted a dinner for William Allen, John Pascall and other important Englishmen staying and living in Rome. The dinner was a lively one, and politics was on everyone’s minds. Sledd remembered that Doctor Allen was ‘marvellous pleasant and he gave to rehearse what news he had heard out of England and Ireland of late’. Pascall was thrilled by the intelligence that he, Luke Kirby and others had heard, by letters smuggled from England, of the successes of Fitzmaurice’s Spanish troops in Ireland. Pascall went even further: he was in ‘good hope and would joy at his heart to see the Spaniards lords of England’, till which time the land was in misery. Pascall wanted to have Queen Elizabeth ‘shaked off her estate, which he hoped would not be long before the matter were put in execution’. Allen said that even more priests would be sent to England. His enthusiasm was growing all the time. The new recruits would leave Rome in the coming spring of 1580.
Many months later, William Allen heard about Sledd’s account of this dinner. He was outraged, dismissing Sledd as a menial servant and calling him a liar. There was venom in Allen’s response:
As for Sledd’s invention of conspiracy made in Doctor Morton’s house, was it not very like that he should be made acquainted with the matter, being and living there as a poor knave … begging of everybody, and known of nobody, and therefore trusted and used no farther of his master but in servile things.
But as William Allen surely knew, the best spies were often humble men. A servant, perhaps unseen and certainly often unacknowledged by his betters, was able to hear and see things other men could not. We can imagine the young Sledd obediently attending on his master’s table with very sharp ears to hear.
After dinner on Sunday, 29 November Nicholas Morton met a priest, a chaplain to Cardinal Darrogone. The matter was a confidential one, but Sledd was listening and watching. He wrote that the two men had a scroll of paper upon which was written the names of leading English Catholic émigrés, soldiers and rebels. Sledd suspected here a great conspiracy, for according to his account Morton and the priest spoke of secret signatories and of three copies of a document, one to be kept by the Pope, the second sent to Spain and the third directed either to William Allen or to Sir Francis Englefield, one of the leading exiles in the Low Countries. According to Sledd, the documents recorded the agreements made by the Pope and King Philip of Spain to restore England to the Catholic faith. What Sledd had discovered, it seems, was a master plan for invasion and conquest.
Sledd’s time in Rome was coming to an end, for he too was about to be sent back towards England in the company of Doctor Allen’s missionary priests. This time Allen himself was travelling with the party back to Rheims. With him was his brother Gabriel, who spoke in a strong Lancashire accent, and whom Sledd clearly did not like: he called Gabriel Allen a clownish man. Sledd described the travellers with his usual precision. Humphrey Ely, who wore a short brown beard, was in his late thirties. Henry Orton, a lawyer, was about thirty years old and an excellent French speaker. Robert Johnson, a priest, was perhaps forty. He was slim, with an untrimmed flaxen yellow beard, a face full of wrinkles and two teeth missing from the right-hand side of his upper jaw. He spoke Italian fluently.
The Allen brothers and the priests bound for England, along with the quietly efficient Charles Sledd, set out on their long hard journey out of Italy after mass on the feast day of Saint Matthew, Thursday, 25 February 1580. They were in a lively mood. Sledd wrote that before supper on that first day Humphrey Ely spoke hard defamatory words against Elizabeth, ‘Mistress Bess, Queen of England’. They would ‘set her out for another Jezebel’. Elizabeth’s tyranny would soon be at an end. Spirits were high.
Sledd and Robert Johnson moved ahead of the others. They left the main party at Siena on 28 February and arrived in Bologna on Friday, 4 March, where they were entertained by the Cardinal of Bologna and lodged in his palace. He gave them a private audience; they kissed his right hand; he gave them both a blessing ‘stretching right two of his forefingers’. The cardinal asked them if they were travelling to England. Johnson answered for them both. Yes, he said, they were sent to England by the Pope to reconcile Queen Elizabeth and her people to the Catholic faith: it was His Holiness’s pleasure to send priests to England secretly to persuade Catholics to resist her: Gregory was minded to deprive Elizabeth of her princely dignities, by either conspiring her death or supporting open rebellion and an invasion. Johnson told the cardinal that the missionary priests were messengers sent to prepare the ways and means. After all, Elizabeth was excommunicated already. The cardinal replied that he knew of the Pope’s intentions ‘for all such business as he meant secretly and openly to be be executed’. He wished for their happy success in converting queen and people. If repentance did not come quickly, he said, there would be great bloodshed.
On that Friday evening Sledd and Johnson enjoyed the cardinal’s hospitality. They ate supper and had breakfast next morning. When they were about to leave on Saturday, William Allen and his companions arrived at the cardinal’s palace. Allen once again instructed Johnson and Sledd to move ahead of the main party, directing them from Bologna to Milan to deliver letters. They were to wait for him in Turin.
The two men, priest and watcher, arrived in Milan on 11 March. They went to the Cardinal of Milan, at whose palace they met nine men and boys, some of them Englishmen, travelling to Rome. Sledd talked to one of the boys, a Londoner of about fifteen whose father had sent him to William Allen’s seminary in Rheims, ‘requesting them to send him to Rome if they pleased, to the college’. Sledd and Johnson went in the opposite direction, heading for home. Johnson was passionate in his mission: ‘he cared not for any in England,’ Sledd wrote, ‘and they should well understand and also know in England that he would not creep in at a window, for he would go in at the broad door.’
By now William Allen was using Sledd as a courier to carry his letters. It was a task Sledd, like other Elizabethan spies, took to easily. He delivered Allen’s letter in Milan and received one in return, and he was able to intercept two packets directed from Rheims. Four days later, on Tuesday, 15 March, Sledd and Johnson caught up with Allen and the others at Turin. Allen replied to the letter Sledd had brought him from Milan and Sledd took it to the Jesuit college in Turin to be posted.
With Sledd working as William Allen’s messenger he and Johnson now fell behind the main party. It took the two companions exactly a week to travel from Turin to Chambéry in Savoy, not a surprise given the perilous journey over the Alps in late March. They would have gone over Mont-Cenis, the usual way for travellers on the post road to Lyons. They arrived in Chambéry on 22 March. There they were told that Allen and his companions had set out that day for Lyons, going by the most direct road west. This, they were advised, was a dangerous way to take; a Huguenot rebellion had broken out; they should go to Lyons by way of Lake Geneva, a much longer journey.
Johnson and Sledd ignored the warnings about the dangers of the direct road to Lyons. They arrived in the city only three days after leaving Chambéry, on Lady Day, Friday, 25 March. But they were still behind the main party. The rector of the Jesuit college in Lyons told them that Allen and his companions had set off only that morning for Rheims. He asked Johnson and Sledd to remain in Lyons for the rest of the day. He wanted them to continue their journey with a fellow countryman, a Jesuit novice of about thirty whose name was Thomas Cottam. Sledd described Cottam as a lean and slender man with red hair, a thin beard and a very freckled face. There was a wart or mole on his right cheek about an inch from his mouth.
Seven days after leaving Lyons the three men – Sledd, Johnson and Cottam – arrived in Troyes. After a hard journey of many hundreds of miles Robert Johnson and Charles Sledd were about to part company. Johnson and Thomas Cottam would go to Rheims. Sledd would travel to Paris. The three men set out in their different directions on Monday, 4 April 1580.
It was in the city of Paris that Sledd began in earnest his career as a spy for Elizabeth’s government.
When Sledd arrived in Paris on Wednesday, 6 April 1580 he went straight to see Elizabeth’s ambassador at the French court, Sir Henry Cobham. Cobham was a man in his early forties, the younger brother of a baron and by 1580 a diplomat of long experience. He would have been used to Englishmen like Sledd, without either invitation or credentials, turning up on his doorstep, just as he was alert to the activities of English Catholics in Paris. Perhaps Cobham was interested in Sledd’s information: perhaps he was not. Probably it was a risk for Sledd to reveal himself to the ambassador: he was a pretty suspicious character. For both men it was bound to be a delicate encounter.
Put simply, Sledd’s purpose was to betray the priests of William Allen’s mission. He had the names of those who had already gone to England. He told Sir Henry that others would follow, some about to cross the English Channel, some shortly to set out from Rome. Sledd also possessed the physical descriptions of twenty of William Allen’s recruits, ‘their stature, favour and apparel’. He gave Cobham ‘an inkling of their pretences’ – a suspicion of their conspiracy.
Sledd came again to Sir Henry the next day, Thursday, 7 April. This time he brought letters of English Catholics, showing how useful he could be in intercepting packets of correspondence, trying to prove to Cobham his loyalty to the queen. Sledd picked up from Englishmen in Paris the news that three of the most important Elizabethan outlaws and exiles in Europe would arrive in the city soon. They were Sir Francis Englefield, Sir Thomas Copley and the northern rebel the Earl of Westmorland.
Sledd visited Sir Henry Cobham probably every day for a week. By now he had gathered up the letters of other Catholics, opening them in front of Sir Henry and reading them out loud. If Sledd hoped to impress Cobham with the news of a great conspiracy he was disappointed: they were simply letters of greeting between friends. But Sledd, after a week of trying to earn Sir Henry’s trust, got his reward. Cobham told Sledd he wanted him to travel to England with some of Allen’s priests. He gave the busy spy five French crowns and a Spanish pistolet to bear the charges of a journey to Rheims, as well as a private seal that Sledd could show to Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth’s secretary, as a secret token from the ambassador. Keen to protect himself, Sledd asked for a letter in Cobham’s hand, or at least Sir Henry’s signature on the papers he had written. He received neither; Sir Henry was wary. Yet Cobham wrote to the queen to inform her that he had been visited by a man lately come from Rome in the company of some priests. He said he would send the man’s name by separate letter to Walsingham. And so he did, but Sledd was supremely protective of his own identity. The name he used was that of one of the men he had met in the rooms of an English Catholic in Paris. Cobham wrote to Walsingham: ‘I send herewith the advertisement of Rowland Russell, written with his own hand. He is upon his return to England to render further testimony of his good meaning.’
Sledd went, as Sir Henry had directed him, to Rheims, carrying with him letters for William Allen from Paris. He arrived on Sunday, 17 April 1580. Allen asked him to dine in the seminary. After dinner he was invited to hear the sermon of an English priest called John Hart. He found Hart a little before three o’clock preparing to speak. All the English scholars gathered to hear a powerful and uncompromising cry in the battle to save English souls.
The theme of Hart’s sermon was suffering for the faith and he began with the passions of Christ. To suffer pain, he said, was to merit salvation all the more. The Pope had appointed men to go into England to expel heresy from that kingdom. Hart said he would rather die than tolerate the heresies of Queen Elizabeth and her advisers. The Pope had excommunicated Elizabeth; the Tudor crown really belonged to Mary Queen of Scots, and for this reason, in support of the Catholic cause, the King of Spain would soon invade England. Those English men and women who could show they were Catholics would be safe: those who could not ‘shall be searched and sifted out as the good corn is from the chaff and be put to the fire and sword’. The queen and her councillors would ‘have such reward, as obstinate heretics ought to have, by the laws of God’. Hart ended his sermon by urging the congregation to stand firm in their faith. If they should die they died as martyrs. Every drop of their blood shed in the faith would raise ten Catholics.
That Sunday evening Sledd wrote to Sir Henry Cobham with a full report of what he had seen and heard. He wrote at length of John Hart. He had discovered that Hart was one of the priests closest to William Allen, often in his company and ‘of his counsel’, in good credit with the spiritual leader of English Catholics in exile.
By 20 April Sledd felt he ‘could do no good’ in Rheims and so he set out on the journey west to Paris. He arrived in the city two days later and that same evening went again to see Cobham. The following day Sledd asked Cobham to sign his papers. Sir Henry refused and Sledd left, knowing that he had outstayed Cobham’s welcome, ‘not minding to come to his honour any more after that’.
Sledd’s work was done in Paris. He had given Sir Henry Cobham the names and descriptions of William Allen’s priests. He had met Allen in Rheims and heard John Hart’s sermon on England’s rescue from Protestant heresy. Although Cobham refused to sign Sledd’s papers – a sensible precaution for the ambassador – Sledd at least had a token he could show to Sir Francis Walsingham at Elizabeth’s court.
There was now no place for Sledd the spy to go but to London.