In November 1588, Father John Gerard and three other Jesuit priests, landed secretly in England. Their plan was to contact the country’s Roman Catholics and minister to their spiritual needs.
Catholics Persecuted in England
In 1534, Henry VIII finally broke with the Roman Catholic Church and set himself up as the Supreme Head of the Church of England. Those who did not accept the new religion faced persecution.
Queen Mary I (1553-58) brought back the Catholic Church as England’s state religion. She turned on Protestants and had 300 of them burned at the stake. Elizabeth I came to the throne and immediately reversed her sister’s re-establishment of Catholicism.
Plots, real and imagined, continued for years with the aim of removing Elizabeth and bringing a Catholic monarch back to the throne of England. As a result, Roman Catholics were harassed and under constant threat of arrest and interrogation.
Rome Sent Spies and Activists to England
During this time, the Roman Catholic Church sent many priests into England to minister to the flock and help organize the return of a Catholic to the throne. John Gerard was one of them.
Gerard came from an aristocratic and formerly Catholic family in England. He received an education at Oxford University and then went to France to study for the priesthood.
According to eyewitnesstohistory.com “Father Gerard mingled easily among English society, passing himself off as a gentleman of leisure.” He managed to escape detection and move around in the Catholic underground for six years.
Capture, Imprisonment, and Torture of John Gerard
Father Gerard’s luck finally ran out in April 1594 when he was betrayed by a servant in a house in which he was staying. After three years behind bars he was sent to the Tower of London where he was subjected to torture. The plan was to get him to reveal the names and whereabouts of his associates who were suspected of plotting against the Queen.
Among the many indignities to which prisoners were subjected was to be manacled in irons and suspended from a post. The pain was excruciating but, according to gunpowder-plot.org, “Gerard was tortured on three separate occasions, without revealing anything.”
Daring Escape from the Tower of London
The authorities decided to put Gerard on trial, but the delay in getting to court gave him his chance. With the help of friends on the outside and with the warder no doubt paid to look the other way he got out of the Tower of London.
Gunpower-plot.org describes the escape of Father Gerard and fellow prisoner John Arden: “On the night of 4 October 1597, they fastened a rope from a tower across the moat, and the rope being almost horizontal, they had to inch their way along the rope to safety…Gerard, still being weak from torture, barely made it across.”
He spent another eight years in hiding in England, celebrating Mass and hearing confessions. Eventually, with aid from many underground Catholics, he was spirited out of England. He died in 1637, aged 73, in Rome but not before he wrote about his exploits in a remarkable book, John Gerard: Autobiography of an Elizabethan.
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