Three other priests were taken with Edmund Campion from Lyford Grange to the Tower of London. One of them, John Collerton, carved a record of his imprisonment in the wall of the Beauchamp Tower: ‘John Colle[r]ton, Pri[e]st, 1581, July 22’. Another, Thomas Ford, a Devonshire man ordained at Brussels in 1573, had been working secretly in England since 1576. William Filby, the third of Campion’s companions, had dreamed at Henley upon Thames of his execution. Waking the house with ‘a very great cry and noise’ in his sleep, he told Justice Lydcot that ‘he verily thought one to be ripping down his body and taking out his bowels’. It was for Filby an accurate premonition.
On 26 July Campion was taken to York House in Westminster, the residence of the lord chancellor, where he was examined by a group of privy councillors. Like other priests under questioning he chose silence over confession. Within days, the Council appointed four commissioners to interrogate him thoroughly. They were Sir Owen Hopton and Robert Beale (a clerk of the Privy Council) as well as two lawyers, John Hammond and Thomas Norton (the same Norton who later wrote the government’s official defence of torture). The Council’s instructions to the commissioners were clear. They were to examine Campion under oath on his loyalty to the queen. To save time and trouble he would be allowed to swear upon a copy of the Catholic Vulgate Bible. If he refused to answer their questions, the commissioners were to put him on the rack.
The examinations began on Tuesday, 1 August. The commissioners went straight to the heart of the matter. Wanting Campion to speak plainly about his loyalty to Elizabeth, they put to him a number of passages from the books of two English Catholic exiles, Richard Bristow and Nicholas Sander. One of the texts had to do with Pope Pius V’s bull of excommunication of 1570, another the so-called Catholic martyrs of the Northern Rising. A third passage, taken from Bristow, suggested that the crown’s subjects were not obliged to obey the authority of wicked, apostate and heretical princes. The commissioners wanted to know if Campion believed Queen Elizabeth to be a true and lawful monarch or a ‘pretensed queen and deprived’. Campion refused to commit himself to an answer, saying that ‘he meddleth neither to nor fro’.
On these questions of loyalty, which in the coming years would be refined and put to other Catholic priests, it was impossible for Campion and his fellow prisoners to answer adequately. Any response to these interrogatories was dangerous. If the priests defended Sander and Bristow they were drawn into matters of politics, practically confessing to treason. If they tried to deflect the questions – common responses were that they did not know the answers, could not tell, or asked not to be pressed – they seemed equally to acknowledge their guilt, using their skills of guile and dissimulation to avoid speaking the truth, or so their interrogators said.
Thus Campion refused to be drawn on questions of loyalty: he would not so easily fall into a charge of high treason. But he began to give the commissioners other information on where he had stayed in England, where he had left his books and which Catholic families had sheltered him. He seems to have revealed the existence of Stephen Brinkley’s secret printing press in Oxfordshire, for the press was discovered on 8 August. Brinkley and his four assistants were sent to the Tower. John Payne, the priest alleged by George Eliot to have masterminded the plan for the queen’s assassination, was tortured on the rack. The four interrogators in the Tower were busy men. The Privy Council wrote to them on 14 August to thank them for their ‘pains’, an Elizabethan phrasing that to modern ears is pricked with a bleak irony.
Private confessions were not enough for Elizabeth’s government. Any malefactor, from the humblest offender to someone as symbolic as Edmund Campion, had to recant, to be seen to recognize his error and then to repent of it. The most public place of all was the pulpit of Paul’s Cross in the shadow of the cathedral, at the heart of London. Given the restrictions of Campion’s close imprisonment in the Tower, his profound opposition to Elizabeth’s Church and her government’s obvious nervousness at the prospect of any publicity it could not control, such a spectacle was impossible. Instead Campion was taken to St Peter ad Vincula, the parish church of the Tower, where, before his fellow prisoners, he was invited to take part in a formal disputation with theologians of the English Church. On 31 August he faced in rigorous debate the Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral and the Dean of Westminster Abbey. The two clergy, recognizing that they had been given time to prepare for a disputation and Campion had not, explained to him that they would question him only upon his ‘brag’, the letter he had written to the Privy Council.
Strange as it may seem today, this formal scholarly disputation – the kind Campion and his opponents had practised hundreds of times in their university and seminary studies – went hand in glove with Campion’s torture on the rack. Both, in very different ways, sought to expose truth and to encourage an admission of error. Indeed, the careful exchange of scholarly points on topics of academic detail had a curious intensity because the debate was held not so far away from the Tower’s torture chamber. But this first disputation was not a courteous irrevelance. Anticipating his trial, Campion said that he was being punished for his religious beliefs. He stated that he had been put twice upon the rack, something more terrible to him, he explained, than hanging. Robert Beale, one of Campion’s interrogators, pounced on this point. While on the rack had the prisoner been asked about any point of faith? Campion replied that he had not: but he had been asked his whereabouts in England and to divulge the names of his hosts and protectors. Beale’s response revealed the danger of Campion’s position. This information was required of Campion, Beale said, because priests had reconciled a number of Elizabeth’s subjects to the Catholic Church, so withdrawing them from their true allegiance to the queen. This offence, as both men knew, was high treason under a statute of 1581. The government’s case against Campion – that in his secret work as a priest he had committed acts of treason – and his defence – that his was a pastoral not a political mission – were clear even in the first disputation.
Elizabeth’s advisers were nervous of the publicity caused by three further disputations with Campion in September. News of them leaked out into London. Gossip, especially on a matter as charged and sensitive as the treason of Campion and his fellow priests, was dangerous. Thomas Norton the commissioner, plainly irritated, wrote to Lord Burghley in late September that they had kept a careful written record of each and every objection and response in the debates. Norton felt that the government had been put on the back foot, fighting a swirl of Catholic rumours: ‘our cause,’ he wrote, ‘is not so subject to false reports of his [Campion’s] favourers’.
Richard Verstegan’s view of Elizabethan persecution: the rack and other tortures in the Tower of London.
The disputations ended in September, but Campion’s torture continued into October. By now the crown’s law officers were involved in the interrogations upon the rack, a sure sign that his trial was approaching. There was a cluster of prosecutions in Star Chamber in Westminster Palace of gentlemen who had sheltered and harboured Campion in his secret work throughout England. The record of the trial of six men – one baron, two knights, two gentlemen and a gentlewoman, the elite of Elizabethan society – stated that ‘to accomplish his wicked and lewd devices’, Edmund Campion had come into the realm and used aliases and disguises ‘in a very ruffian-like sort’. They were sent to the Fleet prison to be kept in close confinement ‘until they shall conform themselves in obedience and duty towards Her Majesty’, each also to be heavily fined.
All of this was preparatory to the main event: the trial of Edmund Campion and other Catholic priests in Westminster Hall in November 1581. Once again, Elizabeth’s government was plainly nervous. Campion had to be tried in the correct way, shown publicly to be a traitor, not the victim of religious persecution. This explains why close to the trial the law officers and Privy Council changed their minds about how to indict him. A first indictment stated that Campion ‘did traitorously pretend to have power’ to absolve Elizabeth’s subjects from their obedience to the queen and ‘to move the same … to promise obedience’ to the Pope. The law used here was the one Robert Beale had alluded to in the first of the Campion disputations. To reconcile a subject to Rome by whatever means was high treason by the statute of 1581. But would that suggest, as Campion had argued throughout, that he was on trial for his religious faith, for his pastoral work as a priest? Certainly it might have done – inside the courtroom and outside it, in gossip on the streets of London, in the fierce Catholic pamphlets printed abroad and smuggled into England.
So the indictment was changed. The law officers dispensed entirely with Tudor statutes. They went instead back to the fourteenth century, to a law passed by a parliament of King Edward III in 1352. This act made it treason to compass the king’s death, to levy war against him or to adhere to his enemies. But to try Campion under this statute was likewise a risk. True, it had nothing to do with faith, Church or religion. But there would have to be sound and convincing evidence that Campion and the other priests tried with him had indeed plotted abroad. The revised indictment stated that the priests had at various times in Rome, Rheims ‘and divers other places in parts beyond the seas’ conspired to ‘deprive, cast down and disinherit’ Elizabeth; ‘to bring and put the same Queen to death and final destruction’; to cause a miserable slaughter in England; to set up insurrection and rebellion in the kingdom; and to induce foreigners to make war against the queen. Their crime, simply, was treason.
William Allen’s account of Edmund Campion in A True, Sincere, and Modest Defence of English Catholicques, 1584.
So how could these charges be proved? Where was the evidence? Out the shadows stepped three men who could offer eyewitness testimony. They were Anthony Munday, once a student of the English College in Rome; Charles Sledd, formerly servant and courier to the priests and exiles; and George Eliot, yeoman of Her Majesty’s chamber, who had helped to capture Edmund Campion at Lyford Grange.
William Allen, hardly surprisingly, called the trial of Campion and the other priests of the Tower of London ‘The most pitiful practice that ever was heard of to shed innocent blood by the face of justice’. At the same trial Allen was found guilty of high treason in his absence and outlawed. To Elizabeth’s government the conviction of Campion and the others was a vindication of its integrity as a kingdom founded upon law. State and Church had to be protected against political enemies. Justice was done. Lord Burghley later wrote bluntly of Campion that he was discovered disguised as a roister (a bully or ruffian) and suffered for his treasons. To counter the image of Campion as a Catholic martyr, Elizabeth’s government described him as a crude and common rebel.
The arguments of the trial followed predictable paths. The prosecuting lawyers put to Campion the evidence of Catholic treasons. They set out the efforts of the Pope to remove Elizabeth from her throne. They spoke of rebellion and conspiracy. Campion said he refused to see how these points were relevant to him and the others on trial. ‘Let not other men’s offences be laid to our charge’, was how Anthony Munday remembered Campion’s words. The prosecution claimed that the books of Nicholas Sander and Richard Bristow, which had been used by interrogators in the Tower to examine the priests’ loyalty to the queen, were set texts in the English seminaries of Rheims and Rome. The men on trial for their lives denied that any such thing was the case. And then Campion deployed the most important and powerful of all the arguments in his defence. His mission, he said, was pastoral and not political. The court could not determine matters of conscience. As priest, he stated, he would never reveal matters of conscience, ‘come rack, come rope’.
The crown had to prove its case. And so for the first time in public view the spies and pursuers of priests came face to face with the men they had lived and travelled with and whose loyalty, for reasons of faith or politics or self-interest, they had betrayed. Already their names and reputations were well known to English Catholics: Sledd the priest-hunter, Munday the writer clashing in print with William Allen, Eliot the enemy of Campion. The moment must have been electric. Munday, only two years before this a young scholar in Rome, testified to the conspiracies he had heard talked about in the city. Eliot gave evidence that Robert Johnson, who was on trial with Campion, had fallen into acquaintance with John Payne, the priest who knew of the plot to murder Elizabeth and her senior ministers. In Westminster Hall Johnson denied Eliot’s accusation. Luke Kirby, another of the priests on trial, likewise disputed Sledd’s evidence that Kirby had attended a treasonable sermon given by William Allen. Kirby, the young Yorkshireman, faced two accusers: the formidable Sledd and Munday, whose friend he had been.
Most devastating of all was the secret dossier Charles Sledd had written for Sir Francis Walsingham, portions of which were read out at the trial. More extraordinary still, there is some evidence that Sledd’s file was doctored to fit the circumstances. It takes a keen eye to spot the adjustments: they are small, but their implications are profound. At one point in the manuscript the name of a spy in Paris – a gentleman ‘appertaining to Sir Francis Walsingham’ – was heavily inked out. There are a couple of other minor alterations. The most significant adjustment of all is easily missed but critical given the fact that Sledd had never set eyes upon Campion till perhaps that very day, or at least after Campion’s capture at Lyford Grange. Sledd knew all but one of the men standing in the dock in Westminster Hall: he had served them in Rome and he had walked with them on the long roads through Italy and France to Paris and Rheims. He could describe them, so well in fact that they had been picked up and arrested on the streets of London. He did not know, and certainly had not met in Rome, Edmund Campion. And yet Campion’s name was added to Sledd’s catalogue of priests who had set out in 1579 and 1580 from Rome to Rheims and England. Just above the name of Robert Persons in the manuscript are the words ‘Edmund Campion, priest Jesuit’. His is the only entry without either a concise biography or a physical description.
The truth of all of this has been lost to time. It may be that Sledd, a stickler for detail, added Campion’s name to his dossier when he found out about Campion’s mission to England. Perhaps it was later added for the sake of completeness. Or it may have been a plain fabrication, by Sledd or by one of Walsingham’s men, the purpose of which was to prove Campion’s associations with priests in Italy and France Sledd had heard plot treason. The circumstances of the trial, which was a critical and symbolic one for Elizabeth’s government, suggest that no effort was spared to bring about success. The priests would always deny the evidence of the spies. It could be said that together Sledd and Munday proved nothing: they merely said the same thing without any firm evidence. And so what were one or two alterations to a document read out in evidence when after all those alterations merely supported the plain facts and truth of what had happened? Campion and his fellow priests were traitors: that had been clear to Elizabeth’s government from the beginning. In November and December 1581 there was never any serious doubt that Edmund Campion and his fellow priests would not be found guilty of high treason. That could have been predicted, indeed, from the moment David Jenkins the pursuivant broke through into the priest-hole at Lyford Grange.
Richard Verstegan’s view of Elizabethan persecution: priests are drawn on hurdles to the gallows to be hanged, drawn and quartered.
Predictably the Catholic presses of Rheims savaged the spies for their false witness against the martyr priests. Anthony Munday was ‘cogging [cheating, deceiving] Munday’, the failed and erring apprentice. Charles Sledd was a lowly servant and betrayer. George Eliot was ‘Judas Eliot’ or ‘Eliot Iscariot’. For the Catholic polemicists, the spies’ false testimony and moral bankruptcy put their characters into very sharp relief. Anthony Munday was even at the gallows at Tyburn to see Campion die. The young writer felt a flush of satisfaction at seeing justice done. Answering the pamphlet of a Catholic priest who had been there also, Munday stamped on any suggestion of Campion’s glorious martyrdom. Campion was smooth, facile, subtle and dangerous. Wickedness, Munday wrote, had been planted in him by the Devil.
On 1 December 1581, a Friday, Campion was tied to a wicker hurdle that was dragged by horses along the roads near St Paul’s Cathedral, through Holborn and close to Newgate prison, along Oxford Street and to the place of execution. This was the customary journey from prison to the gallows. At Tyburn he and two other priests, Ralph Sherwin and Alexander Briant, were hanged till each was almost dead and then cut down from the gallows. While each man was still just alive he was cut open and his genitals and bowels, removed by the public hangman, were burned before him. To those who saw it or read about it, this terrible evisceration was the definitive mark of either treason to queen and country or martyrdom for the true faith of Christ. Munday saw it thus:
Her Majesty to be depriv’d of life,
A foreign power to enter in our land:
Secret rebellion must at home be rife,
Seducing priests, receiv’d that charge in hand
All this was cloaked with religious show
But justice tried, and found it was not so.
A Catholic priest who saw Campion die wrote:
Religion there was treason to the Queen,
preaching of penance war against the land,
priests were such dangerous men as have not been,
prayers and beads were fight and force of hand,
cases of conscience bane unto the state,
so blind is error, so false a witness is hate.
Whatever the truth, it was a grim victory for both sides: for Elizabeth’s government security, for Catholic polemicists propaganda.
On the day of Campion’s execution John Hart, the priest who had preached on the subject of martyrdom when Charles Sledd was in Rheims, wrote a long letter from the Tower to Sir Francis Walsingham. Hart thanked Walsingham for his special favour and gave the queen’s secretary ‘such undoubted hope of my life if my conformity shall be agreeable thereunto’. Hart composed and corrected his letter quickly, given fluency by urgency and anxiety. Already convicted of high treason yet so far spared the gallows, Hart wrote for his life.
He made his loyalty to Elizabeth plain from the beginning. He knew from everything that had been said to him in the Tower that ‘some great matter’ was intended against the realm. He understood that Walsingham knew this also, flattering Sir Francis: ‘forasmuch as whiles conspiracies be but yet thought upon, your honour for your singular wisdom doth forecast how to prevent [them] before they take place’. Confirming what Elizabeth’s government knew already, Hart wrote that it was William Allen who ‘of all others whom I knew beyond the seas must be made privy’ to any plot. He offered himself as a spy able to get close to Allen, to know ‘the very secrets of his whole heart’.
Hart, who was a member of Allen’s circle, offered his service because he possessed the necessary qualifications. He had been close to martyrdom, and nothing (Hart wrote) pleased Allen more than to hear of his scholars’ suffering in the Catholic cause. Hart reminded Walsingham that he had been in prison for a whole year. In that time he had been taken to the rack. He was indicted, tried and condemned. Surely his suffering and fortitude would make Doctor Allen trust him. Hart offered his service not to ‘pull the neck out of the collar again’ – to escape once again with his life – but to serve his prince. He was the first of many priests to offer information on the queen’s enemies in return for life and liberty. In Hart’s case the result was failure. He remained in the Tower, cheating execution in May 1582 probably by once again offering conformity, only to be banished from England in 1585. He died a year later in Poland. It was a cause of distress to his brother William, a priest in Rome, that John Hart had not died as a martyr with Edmund Campion.
As well as private wrestlings with conscience and loyalty, the execution of Campion and his fellow priests was the talk of London. There was gossip. Words were spoken, probably often in anger, that fell short of treason but were dangerous nevertheless. One Oliver Pluckytt of the parish of St Andrew in Holborn was reported to have said that Campion ‘was both discreet and learned, and did say very well [in the disputations], and that he thought in his conscience that he was an honest man’. A neighbour of Pluckytt’s asked Pluckytt to confirm whether he had indeed spoken these words about Campion. Pluckytt was happy to say that he had, to which came the reply: ‘if you think so well of him that is judged for treason, we do not think well of you.’ Pluckytt’s words, reported to higher authority, sent him to prison at least for a time.
Campion’s execution did not lessen the government’s anxiety. Officials intercepted letters, captured and interrogated priests and watched Catholic families closely. Rumours suggested the fact of a political effort to destroy England, as Elizabeth’s advisers had believed all along. In these tense months, Sir Francis Walsingham’s agents were very busy indeed.
One of the most effective of Walsingham’s informants was a man who called himself Barnard. His real name, which he never used, may have been Robert Woodward; we know it only by chance. Often he simply marked papers with a monogram. He may have been a Derbyshire man. He certainly knew the roads between Dieppe and Rome, something that fits with another piece of information from a different source: Charles Sledd, who first met Barnard in 1579 or 1580, said that he was the servant to an English Catholic in Paris called Nicholas Wendon. Indeed Sledd knew Barnard as Robert Wood. So Barnard was, to say the least, an elusive and careful man with keen eyes and ears and a busy pen, not unlike Sledd himself. Barnard’s reports were precise; he could write coolly and urgently. He knew the underground community of Catholics very well. Outwardly the honest servant to Catholic families and a courier of letters, he listened carefully to conversations, reported news and gossip and, most significantly of all, read and copied documents passing between seminary priests and Jesuits secretly in England. As Sledd, too, had shown, the best Elizabethan spies were often household servants.
Barnard was supremely effective at what he did. He intercepted for Walsingham one letter that reported the conversion of over two hundred in Staffordshire to the Catholic faith. Barnard knew the priests who were doing this missionary work. He wrote to Walsingham: ‘If it may please your honour that I may … meet with them all, for my acquaintance there is such, as I shall have free access among them all.’
A few weeks later, on 5 January 1582, Barnard noted talk of an invasion force for England to be gathered by King Philip of Spain, funded by the Pope, and commanded by the English rebel the Earl of Westmorland. He reported that Catholics hoped to see Westmorland and the Spanish general Alba in England before Midsummer. The ports and havens had to be watched, for Catholics kept coming in and out of England. They boasted of their success, saying ‘a change were at hand’. ‘Right honourable,’ Barnard wrote to Walsingham, ‘the times be dangerous, the people wilful and desirous of change; I fear me there is greater danger at hand than is provided for.’ The peril to England’s security was very clear. A royal proclamation in April condemned Campion and his fellow traitors. Jesuits and seminary priests were guilty of high treason, it said, and anyone who helped or sheltered them would feel the terrible force of the law.
Elizabeth’s government enforced parliament’s statutes as rigorously as it could. The press of the queen’s printer, Christopher Barker, was busy in 1582 countering the propaganda claims of William Allen in Rheims. Barker printed an official account of the priests’ interrogations in the Tower, giving their answers verbatim. Allen responded with a book celebrating ‘the glorious martyrdom’ of Campion and his fellow priests, using those same interrogations to show their innocence in the face of a ruthless persecution. As more priests went to the gallows for their war against Elizabeth and her kingdom – one in April 1582, seven a month later – Thomas Norton, one of Campion’s interrogators, published his robust public defence of its policy against the priests, defending torture as legitimate when it was used ‘for the Queen’s safety to disclose the manner of the treason’. This defence, too, came off Barker’s press, though Norton’s name was nowhere mentioned: the pamphlet had the anonymity of high officialdom.
Catholic books presented a huge problem to the government. In the view of Elizabeth’s advisers and officials, the books of the English exiles, so effectively smuggled into England from abroad, helped to spread the disease of treason. Thomas Norton wrote: ‘You see by these books and such other [how] dangerously [Robert] Persons and the rest still walk abroad.’ Persons had left England, it was believed to write on Campion’s martyrdom. But the influence of the exiles in Rome and Rheims and the reputations of those priests executed at Tyburn were enhanced by books read secretly. Little by little, said Thomas Norton, ‘a multitude of subjects grow infected’. A priest arrested in London was discovered to have received (and then presumably to have passed on) six copies of a ‘traitorous’ book on Campion’s so-called martyrdom. Forty seditious books were found at the lodgings of a Catholic who lived in Paternoster Row near St Paul’s Cathedral. Government informants, justices and officials did their best to seize what they could.
At first the worry was imminent invasion. That fear, however, had steadied a little by the spring of 1582. In the weeks following Campion’s execution Barnard expected a rebellion. A few months later he still believed that any danger came from a Catholic uprising in England supported by the forces of the Pope and the King of Spain. But now he sensed little immediate danger. He wrote to Walsingham in late April: for any ‘likelihood of rebellion to be this spring or summer attempted, I do not see any hope’. There were only a few priests left in London (we have to suspect that those who had not been captured had gone off into the country), but those who did remain were sheltered by the lawyers of the inns of common law. Like other informants, Barnard gave specific information, to be noted and filed away by Walsingham’s office. He knew one especially pernicious Catholic in London called Master Marsh, ‘an arrogant papist’, who like his sons had spent some time in France. One of those sons now lay at the sign of the White Swan in Holborn, on the corner of Gray’s Inn Lane.
Like any good servant, Barnard had trained himself to listen and be silent. For a man who gathered much of what he reported from rumour and gossip, he was well informed. He knew, for example, that after Edmund Campion’s execution Robert Persons had left England for Rouen. When Barnard wrote to Walsingham that Persons was now engaged upon a book to defend Campion, he reflected what English Catholics were saying to one another in secret. And that was the usefulness of a man like Barnard. He was able to give Walsingham a feel for the mood of the Catholic underground, leaving Sir Francis and his staff to sort out the likely facts. The value of Barnard, alias Robert Barnard alias Robert Wood alias Robert Woodward, was to report what Catholics were talking about, their hopes, fears and anxieties, and thoughts of the future. His own concerns were more material. In May 1582 he asked Walsingham to have ‘some consideration of me towards my apparel, the which is such, as in good faith I am ashamed thereof’. He needed, in other words, a new suit of clothes.
If Barnard was skilled at playing the part of a reliable servant of English Catholics, he was used also to working secretly with other agents. On Wednesday, 9 May he dined in London with Master Wendon, the brother of Barnard’s former master Nicholas Wendon. The following day Barnard wrote to Charles Sledd with the details of Catholics’ letters and books passing between England, Rouen and Paris. Master Wendon, Barnard informed Sledd, was going to Rome to see his brother, travelling on a passport signed by the French ambassador to Elizabeth’s court. Barnard himself had given Wendon a note of the roads from Dieppe to Rome.
Barnard told Sledd that he was not sure when Master Wendon would set out on his journey: ‘he is so uncertain of his departure’. But the port was to be Rye. Barnard gave Wendon’s description. He would be wearing ‘a pair of gascoyne hose black’ (wide black breeches), over-breeches of stiff cotton or linen, and a black leather jerkin. Wendon’s face was small and lean, ‘his beard hath been yellow, but now it is mixed half white’. Barnard thought that few letters would be found upon Wendon but he was not to pass without being searched. Standing back in the shadows Barnard gave his friend Charles Sledd everything he needed to hold and search Master Wendon before he left for France.
Together Sledd and Barnard worked to capture priests and frustrate the secret plans of Catholics travelling between England and France. Or at least that was what Barnard tried to do. In the case of Master Wendon he was thrown only by the simple fact that he could not find Sledd at his lodgings in London. Sledd, an elusive man at the best of times, could be found nowhere. Barnard was mystified. ‘I have been divers and sundry times at Master Sledd his lodging but never could meet with him,’ he wrote to Walsingham at the end of May. Priests, he said, were slipping through the net, and all because Barnard could never find Charles Sledd at home. ‘Right honourable, this is most true,’ he told Walsingham. He could not quite believe the strangeness of it all.
