God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests & the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot
“Once used as a site for archery tournaments and wrestling matches, by 1588 the fields had fallen victim to urban sprawl. Contemporary commentator John Stow complained ‘there is now made a continual building throughout of garden houses and small cottages’.1A description of one of these cottages remains. The ground floor contained a kitchen and a dining room. The first floor was given over to a chapel that doubled at night as a sleeping loft. The cellar beneath held sufficient storage space for logs, coal and beer barrels. And behind the carefully piled provisions was a hiding place with room for six or seven men. In the autumn of 1588 this small, three-roomed cottage served as the London headquarters of the Jesuit mission to England.2It was here that John Gerard made his way towards the end of November, as the first snows of an unseasonably bitter winter blanketed the country. Gerard recorded his journey south in perfunctory style—‘there was no incident on the way’—and for the length o...f time it took him to appear in London he gave no explanation.MoreLess
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